Incompetent Leaders – 2nd Health Care Worker Tests Positive For Ebola At Dallas Hospital – Video

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Incompetent Leaders - 2nd Health Care Worker Tests Positive For Ebola At Dallas Hospital
Incompetent Leaders 2nd Hospital Health Care Worker Tests Positive For Ebola At Dallas Hospital Second Health Care Worker Tests Positive For Ebola At Dallas ...

By: Charles Walton

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Incompetent Leaders - 2nd Health Care Worker Tests Positive For Ebola At Dallas Hospital - Video

Mercy Health saves $1.2 million by moving to the cloud

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Health-care provider saved money by migrating two data centres into Dimension Data hybrid cloud

Victorian-based health care provider Mercy Health has saved an estimated $1.2 million following the migration of production workloads into a hybrid cloud environment.

Mercy Health CIO Dmitri Mirvis said the cost savings resulted from not having to upgrade aging servers and IT infrastructure. The health provider was running two physical data centres in Melbourne and Sydney.

I joined Mercy Health at the end of 2012 and I performed a review of the situation in our IT space. It was obvious that a lot of infrastructure was crumbling and was getting in the way of us implementing new systems, he said.

The majority of Mercy Healths servers were seven years' old. It was also running older versions of system software like Windows Server 2003.

Instead of looking at service improvements, most of my infrastructure team was spending their time juggling pieces of hardware, said Mirvis.

It was clear that we had to build our technical foundation as the first step of IT strategy. The way forward would be to go to the cloud. I was fairly comfortable with the cloud concept because in my previous job, I was exposed to utility computing as it was called in the early 2000s which had similar principals to the cloud.

After going to tender, the health provider selected Dimension Data. In June 2014, the vendor completed a nine-month migration of Mercy Healths entire data centre environment to the cloud, providing the organisation with improved agility, reliability and operating efficiencies.

Mercy Health now uses Dimension Datas Melbourne managed cloud platform (MCP) for production workloads and the vendors Sydney MCP as its disaster recovery site.

According to Mirvis, it chose Dimension Data as they were a good match for a mid-size organisation like Mercy Health. The health care provider has 5500 staff and runs 31 sites across Australia.

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Mercy Health saves $1.2 million by moving to the cloud

Cruise ship bearing quarantined health care worker returns to port

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Galveston, Texas A Texas-based cruise ship carrying a Dallas health care worker who is being monitored for signs of Ebola returned to port early Sunday, company officials said.

The unidentified woman who is being monitored disembarked the Carnival Magic with her husband shortly after the ship returned to Galveston, Texas, about 6 a.m. EDT, said Vicky Rey, vice president of guest care for Carnival Cruise Lines. Rey said the couple drove themselves home, but offered no further details.

Company and federal officials have said the woman being monitored for Ebola poses no risk because she has shown no symptoms and has voluntarily self-quarantined.

Petty Officer Andy Kendrick told The Associated Press that a Coast Guard crew flew in a helicopter Saturday to meet the Carnival Magic and retrieved a blood sample from the woman. He said the blood sample was taken to a state lab in Austin for processing.

Kendrick had no further details about how the sample was taken. He said the decision to take the sample was made in coordination with the federal, state and local health authorities.

Obama administration officials said the passenger handled a lab specimen from Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man diagnosed with Ebola who died at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital earlier this month. Officials said the woman poses no risk because she has shown no signs of illness for 19 days and has voluntarily self-quarantined on the cruise ship.

US officials had been seeking ways to return the woman and her husband to the US before the ship completes its cruise on Sunday.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that when the woman left the US on the cruise ship from Galveston, Texas, on Oct. 12 health officials were requiring only self-monitoring.

Carnival Cruise Lines said in a statement that the woman, a lab supervisor, remained in isolation "and is not deemed to be a risk to any guests or crew."

"We are in close contact with the CDC, and at this time it has been determined that the appropriate course of action is to simply keep the guest in isolation on board," the statement said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Cruise ship bearing quarantined health care worker returns to port

Cruise Ship Carrying Health Worker Monitored for Ebola Returns

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Passengers on a cruise ship carrying a Dallas health care worker who handled specimens of an Ebola-infected patient expressed mixed feelings today after arriving at the Port of Galveston in Texas.

The Carnival Magic reached the port about 5 a.m. The health care worker and her travel partner were allowed to disembark with restrictions, according to the Galveston County Health Department.

The health care worker had been self-quarantined on the ship and hasn't shown signs of the virus for 19 days, officials said.

One passenger on the ship, Chris Perry, said the experience reminded him of the AIDS scare in the late 1980s, "Where people were just fearful of anybody around it."

"Outside of that, you know, once everybody kind of started understanding, it wasn't that big of a deal," Perry said.

Another passenger, John Cascio, said he was not too concerned.

"I really wasn't worried about it," Cascio said. "I knew they would take care of what's supposed to be taken care of."

But one passenger who chose to speak anonymously had some concerns.

"I was worried because if she did have Ebola, you'd be quarantined on the boat," the passenger said.

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Cruise Ship Carrying Health Worker Monitored for Ebola Returns

Many Older People Have Mutations Linked to Leukemia, Lymphoma in Their Blood Cells

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Newswise At least 2 percent of people over age 40 and 5 percent of people over 70 have mutations linked to leukemia and lymphoma in their blood cells, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Mutations in the bodys cells randomly accumulate as part of the aging process, and most are harmless. For some people, genetic changes in blood cells can develop in genes that play roles in initiating leukemia and lymphoma even though such people dont have the blood cancers, the scientists report Oct. 19 in Nature Medicine.

The findings, based on blood samples from nearly 3,000 patients, dont mean that people with these genetic mutations are destined to develop a blood cancer. In fact, the vast majority of them wont as the incidence of blood cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma is less than 0.1 percent among the elderly.

But its quite striking how many people over age 70 have these mutations, said senior author Li Ding, PhD, of The Genome Institute at Washington University. The power of this study lies in the large number of people we screened. We dont yet know whether having one of these mutations causes a higher than normal risk of developing blood cancers. More research would be required to better understand that risk.

The researchers analyzed blood samples from people enrolled in The Cancer Genome Atlas project, a massive endeavor funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The effort involves cataloguing the genetic errors involved in more than 20 types of cancers.

The patients whose blood was analyzed for the current study had been diagnosed with cancer but were not known to have leukemia, lymphoma or a blood disease. They ranged in age from 10 to 90 at the time of diagnosis and had donated blood and tumor samples before starting cancer treatment. Therefore, any mutations identified by the researchers would not have been associated with chemotherapy or radiation therapy, which can damage cells DNA.

The researchers, including Genome Institute scientists Mingchao Xie, Charles Lu, PhD, and Jiayin Wang, PhD, zeroed in on mutations that were present in the blood but not in tumor samples from the same patients. Such genetic changes in the blood would be associated with changes in stem cells that develop into blood cells, but not to the same patients cancer.

They looked closely at 556 known cancer genes. In 341 patients ages 40-49, fewer than 1 percent had mutations in 19 leukemia- or lymphoma-related genes. But among 475 people ages 70-79, over 5 percent did. And over 6 percent of the 132 people ages 80-89 had mutations in these genes.

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Many Older People Have Mutations Linked to Leukemia, Lymphoma in Their Blood Cells