Many are welcoming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's tighter safety guidelines for treating Ebola patients.
But meeting those standards may pose financial challenges for hospitals.
Last week, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden detailed more stringent protocols for personal protective equipment, calling for gear that leaves no skin exposed. The CDC also advised hospitals to assign an observer who monitors clinicians and workers as they don and doff equipment, as well as a site manager to make sure all protocols are maintained.
The government beefed up its guidelines after the Ebola virus was transmitted to two nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas who treated the first U.S. Ebola patient, who later died. “This is the level of protection I and other colleagues in the field had been calling for even prior to the transmissions,” said Dr. Dan Hanfling, a contributing scholar at the Pittsburgh-based UPMC health system.