Police officers stood outside the apartment of Dr. Craig Spencer on West 147th Street in Harlem on Thursday. Credit
Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola
patients in Guinea tested positive for the Ebola virus Thursday,
becoming the city’s first diagnosed case.
The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital on Thursday and
placed in isolation while health care workers spread out across the city
to trace anyone he might have come into contact with in recent days. A
further test will be conducted by the federal Centers for Disease
Control to confirm the initial test.
While officials have said they expected isolated cases of the disease to
arrive in New York eventually, and had been preparing for this moment
for months, the first case highlighted the challenges surrounding
containment of the virus, especially in a crowded metropolis.
Even as the authorities worked to confirm that Mr. Spencer was infected with
Ebola, it emerged that he traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the
subway on Wednesday night, when he went to a bowling alley and then took
a taxi home.
The next morning, he reported having a temperature of 103 degrees, raising
questions about his health while he was out in public.
Photo
A photo of Dr. Spencer posted on his Facebook page.
A person infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin
to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air. As the
person becomes sicker, the viral load in the body builds, and they
become more and more contagious.
Dr. Spencer’s travel history and the timing of the onset of his symptoms
led health officials to dispatch “disease detectives immediately began
to actively trace all of the patient’s contacts to identify anyone who
may be at potential risk,” according to a statement released by the department.
It was unclear if the city was trying to find people who might have come
into contact with Dr. Spencer on the subway. The Metropolitan
Transportation Authority directed all questions to the health
department, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment on
the issue.
At Dr. Spencer’s apartment in Harlem, his home was sealed off and workers
distributed informational fliers about the disease. It was not clear if
anyone was being quarantined.
Health authorities declined to say how many people in total might have come
into contact with Dr. Spencer while he was symptomatic.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking at a press conference Thursday evening before
the diagnosis, said Dr. Spencer has given health workers a detailed
accounting of his activities over the last few days.
“Our understanding is that very few people were in direct contact with him,” Mr. de Blasio said.
Dr. Spencer had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Guinea,
treating Ebola patients, before returning to New York City on Oct. 14,
according to a city official.
Photo
A photograph of Dr. Spencer on his LinkedIn page.
He told the authorities that he did not believe the protective gear he
wore while working with Ebola patients had been breached but had been
monitoring his own health.
Doctors Without Borders, in a statement, said it provides guidelines for its
staff on their return from Ebola assignments, but did not elaborate on
those protocols.
“The individual engaged in regular health monitoring and reported this development immediately,” the group said in a statement.
Dr. Spencer began to feel sluggish on Tuesday but did not develop a fever
until Thursday morning, he told the authorities. At 11 a.m., the doctor
found that he had a 103-degree temperature and alerted the staff of
Doctors Without Borders, according to the official.
The staff of Doctors Without Borders called the city’s health department, which in turn called the Fire Department.
Emergency medical workers, wearing full personal protective gear, rushed to Dr.
Spencer’s apartment, on West 147th Street. He was transported to
Bellevue and arrived shortly after 1 p.m.
He was placed in a special isolation unit and is being seen by the
pre-designated medical critical care team. They are in personal
protective equipment with undergarment air ventilation systems.
Bellevue doctors have prepared for an Ebola patient with numerous drills and
tests using “test patients” as well as actual treatment of suspected
cases that turned out to be false alarms.
Photo
Bellevue Hospital has been designated the center for treatment of the Ebola virus in New York City. Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
A health care worker at the hospital said that Dr. Spencer seemed very
sick and it was unclear to the medical staff why he had not gone to the
hospital earlier, since his fever was high, at 103.
Dr. Spencer is a fellow of international emergency medicine at
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and an
instructor in clinical medicine at Columbia University.
“He is a committed and responsible physician who always puts his patients
first,” the hospital said in a statement. “He has not been to work at
our hospital and has not seen any patients at our hospital since his
return from overseas.”
Even before the diagnosis, the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention dispatched a team of experts to assist in the case, before
the test results were even known.
More than 30 people have gone to city hospitals and raised suspicions of
Ebola, but in all those cases, health workers were able to rule it out
without a blood test.
While the city stepped up its laboratory capacity so it can get test results
within four to six hours, because of the precautions that need to be
taken when drawing blood and treating a person possibly sick with Ebola,
it took until late in the evening to confirm the diagnosis.
But doctors said that even before the results came in, it seemed likely
that he was infected. Symptoms usually occur within eight to 10 days of
infection and Dr. Spencer was home nine days when he reported feeling
ill.
Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids and secretions, including blood, mucus, feces and vomit.
Where the Patient Is Being Treated
A doctor, who was recently in West Africa treating Ebola
patients, was taken Thursday from his apartment in Harlem to Bellevue
Hospital Center after he reported a high fever.
The patient is in one of four isolation rooms
in the infectious disease ward on an upper floor of this building. The
rooms have been designated for high-probability or confirmed Ebola
cases. The ward also has a lab to handle Ebola blood samples.
Bellevue
Hospital
Center
Doctor’s
apartment
manhattan
Bellevue
Because of its high mortality rate — Ebola kills more than half of the people
it infects — the disease spreads fear along with infection.
The authorities have been on high alert ever since Thomas Eric Duncan
traveled to the United States in September from Liberia, and was later
given a diagnosis of Ebola.
Several days after his death, a nurse who helped care for Mr. Duncan learned
she had Ebola. Two nurses who treated Mr. Duncan fell ill but have since
recovered.
That single case led to hundreds of people being quarantined or being asked to remain isolated from the general public.
The missteps by both local and federal authorities in handling the nation’s
first Ebola case raised questions about the ability of health care
workers to safely treat those with the disease.
In the New York City region, hospitals and emergency workers have been preparing for the appearance of the virus for months.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster
Preparedness at Columbia University and a special adviser to Mayor de
Blasio, said that the risk to the general public was minimal, but
depended on a city moving swiftly.
“New York has mobilized not only a world class health department, but has
full engagement of many other agencies that need to be on the response
team,” he said.
Matt Flegenheimer, J. David Goodman, Kia Gregory and Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting. Elisa Cho contributed research.
The only time Church Hierarchy or the Church Body should be able to vote on something is when Scripture remains silent on the subject! Scripture is unchangeable and not up to vote on by men!
Adventist Church Vice President Mike Ryan chairs Annual Council
on Tuesday, October 14 as delegates overwhelmingly voted to place an
item on the agenda of next year's General Conference Session asking if
regional divisions may allow women to be ordained as ministers. The vote
was 243 to 44, with 3 abstaining. [photo: Viviene Martinelli]
Annual Council asks Session to consider letting divisions decide on ordination
October 14, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Edwin Manuel Garcia/ANN
The Seventh-day Adventist Church as early as next July may decide to take a historic vote on whether to allow women to be ordained ministers.
The decision to allow for a vote was made today by the General Conference Executive Committee at the Church’s world headquarters during the 2014 Annual Council. A vote on women’s ordination could put an end to—or further prolong—a decades-old debate that has threatened to divide the denomination, according to those on both sides of the issue.
With 243 votes in favor and 44 against, and at the end of daylong deliberation, the Executive Committee agreed to place the following question on the agenda of the 2015 General Conference Session in July, which sets policy for the entire Church:
"Whereas, The unity for which Jesus prayed is vitally important to the witness of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and;
"Whereas, The Seventh-day Adventist Church seeks to engage every member in its worldwide mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ among people from every nation, culture and ethnicity, and;
"Whereas, Various groups appointed by the General Conference and its divisions have carefully studied the Bible and Ellen G White writings with respect to the ordination of women and have not arrived at consensus as to whether ministerial ordination for women is unilaterally affirmed or denied, and;
"Whereas, The Seventh-day Adventist Church affirms that “God has ordained that the representatives of His Church from all parts of the earth, when assembled in a General Conference Session, shall have authority”
"Therefore, The General Conference Executive Committee requests delegates in their sacred responsibility to God at the 2015 General Conference Session to respond to the following question:
"After your prayerful study on ordination from the Bible, the writings of Ellen G White, and the reports of the study commissions, and;
"After your careful consideration of what is best for the Church and the fulfillment of its mission,
"Is it acceptable for division executive committees, as they may deem it appropriate in their territories, to make provision for the ordination of women to the gospel ministry? Yes or No"[.]
If the question about the theology of ordination is put up for vote, and passes, then leaders in each of the church’s 13 world regions may decide whether to ordain women in their territory.
The proposal voted by the Executive Committee today was brought to the assembly floor as a recommendation from the Church’s top officials and could be considered a creative way of dealing with a thorny issue by taking a neutral-leaning stance.
Some proponents of women’s ordination voted in favor of the motion but expressed strong concerns that the proposal before the Executive Committee lacked a formal recommendation for or against ordination. Proponents fear the issue will carry less weight when the question comes up at the General Conference Session that meets July 2-11 in San Antonio, Texas, United States.
“I think this body needs to give direction to the world church,” said David Weigley, president of the North American Division’s Columbia Union Conference. “We are missing a golden opportunity to give direction. Leaders lead, they give direction,” he said.
“Based on what I see from the history of this particular issue, it seems that the Annual Council has always played a very prominent role in what is passed onto the GC session,” said Heather-Dawn Small, Women’s Ministries director for the Adventist world church. “I’ve seen from the past that what this Annual Council decides influences the GC Session.”
Today's Annual Council’s chairman, Vice President Mike Ryan, suggested that the recommendation needed to be unbiased, and that the ordination question was best suited for the delegation at Session.
More than 20 people spoke on varying sides of the issue.
Alberto C. Gulfan Jr., president of the Southern Asia-Pacific Division, said he appreciates the contribution of female evangelists, but that his region’s constituency “is not ready to move towards the ordination of women pastors.” He added: “We are also supporting this recommendation to bring this to the General Conference in Session and let the world decide on the issue once and for all.”
General Conference President Ted N. C. Wilson, who has opposed recent moves for women's ordination that have come before Annual Council, did not express his opinion during the meeting, but indicated before the discussion that he would be willing to adjust his stance.
“If this body accepts the recommendation to place a question before the General Conference Session and that Session after prayerful consideration and review votes something,” Wilson announced, “I pledge to you I will follow what the General Conference votes. I want to ask each of you to do the same.”
The discussion over women’s ordination began more than 130 years ago, according to Church archives, and has intensified since the 1970s, especially where members are calling for change, including the United States, parts of Europe, and the South Pacific. The General Conference Sessions in 1990 and 1995 voted down proposals that would have allowed women’s ordination, and the matter has not returned to a Session agenda since then.
However, at the 2010 Session in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, a delegate from the U.S. state of Pennsylvania made a request “for the Adventist Church to develop and articulate a theology of ordination.”
That question led to a commitment from General Conference leaders to open the discussion and appoint the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, or TOSC. The 106-member committee was asked to take a profound look at ordination and provide information to help the General Conference decide how to handle the matter.
TOSC’s response was a 127-page report that was the basis for today’s discussion.
The report acknowledged that committee members—who hailed from around the world and met four times, for several days each time—were unable to come to agreement on whether to support or oppose women’s ordination.
TOSC produced three separate statements to summarize members’ viewpoints. Those positions were then explained by three different scholars in a presentation before the Executive Committee; the statements also were printed in the TOSC report.
One position, labeled Statement No. 1, said that only men could be ordained throughout the world church. Statement No. 2 said that entities responsible for hiring pastors should be able to make their own decisions on whether to ordain female ministers. Statement No. 3 said the decision should be left to the leadership “at a proper level” to determine whether ordination “may be appropriate for their area or region.”
While the theology of ordination will be placed on the General Conference Session agenda, the measure’s outcome is far from certain. The nearly 2,600 voting delegates may decide to adopt, reject, or amend the proposal.
In addition to having essentially no medical qualifications for the newly invented “Ebola czar” post
aside from serving as a lobbyist for a pharmaceutical firm, attorney
and political operative Ron Klain (shown) is under fire after a video
surfaced of him declaring that “growing population” — particularly in Africa — was the “top leadership challenge” for the world today. Critics expressed outrage over the comments, especially considering warnings by demographic experts of an upcoming plunge in population caused by a
dramatic decline in birthrates across most of the world. But news
reports citing insiders suggest that Obama has even bigger plans for
Klain within the administration than exploiting the Ebola scare to advance tyranny.
In a 2008 video-taped interview first highlighted by Gotnews.com and promptly picked up by other alternative outlets such as Infowars, Klain, who served as chief of staff to discredited “global-warming” guru and population controller Al Gore,
responds to a question from a Georgetown interviewer about the top
challenge facing world leaders. Sitting next to his wife Monica Medina,
the attorney and former operative for Vice President Joe Biden declared
that overpopulation — not starvation, lack of medical care, war,
disease, tyranny, genocide, or poverty — was actually the planet’s
biggest problem.
“I think the top leadership challenge issue in our world today is how
to deal with the continuing, growing population in the world, and all
the resource demands it places on the world and burgeoning populations
in Africa and Asia that lack the resources to have a healthy, happy
life,” Klain explained, echoing a common theme among establishment types
who have long publicly expressed their desire to slash the human
population under various pretexts. The comments fit nicely with discredited UN “sustainable development” theories about alleged pressure on resources that have little basis in reality.
“We’ve got to find a way to make the world work for everyone,” Klain
continued. “Climate change is an issue that impacts that greatly by
making it harder for people to live where they live, by causing
disruptions, and lack of resources.” Of course, like the gloom-and-doom
pseudo-prophecies of the overpopulation fanatics, virtually every
prediction surrounding alleged man-made “climate change” — both the
global warming and global cooling varieties — has proven to be beyond ridiculous in retrospect.
The new Ebola czar’s former boss, Biden, has also stoked controversy
on related issues in the past.
More recently, another one of Klain’s former bosses, Al Gore, declared “fertility management” that is “ubiquitously available”
to be crucial in stopping alleged global warming. Klain’s views also
fit nicely with those of perhaps the most notorious population-control
zealot in the administration, Obama’s “Science” Czar John Holdren. In a
widely ridiculed 1977 book dubbed Ecoscience, Holdren called
for the imposition of what he called a “planetary regime” and “global
police force” that would perpetrate forced abortions and
mass-sterilization programs via the water supply under the guise of
preventing a “crisis” of supposed “overpopulation.”
“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control
laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be
sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis
became sufficiently severe to endanger the society,” Holdren wrote,
hiding behind a passive voice while making delusional claims about the
U.S. Constitution purportedly authorizing forced abortions and
sterilization by his “planetary regime” to control world resources. It
was not clear who, other than Holdren and perhaps extreme eugenicists of
decades past, had “concluded” that mandatory abortions and
sterilizations would be authorized under the U.S. Constitution.
More recently, Holdren, like Gore, has been the subject of intense
ridicule for his failed global-cooling predictions of previous decades —
with the current “Science czar” having previously warned of a global
“ice age” that would kill a billion people. Last winter, Holdren further
cemented his position as a laughing stock after contradicting every
previous warmist prediction and outlandishly trying to blame record cold
temperatures across America on “global warming,” which has been on “pause” for almost two decades.
Regardless of warming, cooling, or neither, however, Holdren has never
repudiated the draconian views on population control expressed in his
book.
But unwarranted hysteria over the number of people on the planet is
hardly a new phenomenon in the upper echelons of the U.S. government and
foreign-policy establishment either. Former Secretary of State Henry “New World Order” Kissinger, for example, became infamous for his 1974 “National Security Memorandum 200”
calling for U.S. taxpayers to fund a planetary depopulation operation
under the guise of protecting America’s supposed “national interests.”
In the memo, Kissinger, a key globalist front-man who has played a major
role in some of the greatest human tragedies of the last five decades,
said mass abortion would be required to reduce the population of the
Third Word.
At the UN, meanwhile, the population-control zealots are also working
hard to slash the number of people on the planet — with much of their
scheming funded by U.S. taxpayers and mega-billionaires such as Bill
Gates. Earlier this year, The New American reported on a new plot by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Obama administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development
to deal with what they referred to as the “challenge” of population
numbers in Kenya. Among other schemes, the plan to reduce the population
to “desirable” levels involves brainwashing African women to have fewer
children, showering the nation with contraception, promoting abortion,
and more.
Like the Obama administration more broadly, Klain’s 2008 interview
citing overpopulation as the top leadership issue for the world suggests
that the new “Ebola czar” considers U.S. government intervention abroad
to be essential. “I think that the days when Americans could just be
focused on America and not really be engaged in the world are past us,”
he said. “Our economy is too dependent on events overseas, our political
system is dependent on events overseas.” In other words, despite being
17 trillion in debt, Washington, D.C., must continue borrowing to meddle
in the affairs of other nations — with all of the disastrous fruits such machinations have produced.
Multiple analysts have highlighted other troubling elements of
Klain’s background as well. “The new Ebola czar has ties to a secret
liberal dark money group and once worked as a lobbyist for a
prescription drug company that denied experimental drugs to dying cancer
patients,” reported Elizabeth
Harrington in the online Washington Free Beacon. Klain was also listed
as a trustee for the radical Big Government group “Third Way,” which
promotes amnesty, gun control, and other deeply controversial
“progressive” plots.
The new Ebola czar serves on the board of the Big Business-funded Big
Government outfit known as the Center for American Progress (CAP), too.
According to a report in Politico citing “administration insiders,”
Klain may be next in line to succeed current Obama “counselor” John
Podesta, another extremist who founded and led the CAP and recently
worked with the UN on a plan to “profoundly and dramatically” alter the “worldview” of every person on the planet.
Instead of allowing Obama to invent new “czar” positions and pack
them with unqualified extremists, Congress ought to be holding hearings,
cutting funding for executive-branch abuses, and restraining the
administration.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American magazine, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
