E.R.R

E.R.R

Saturday, November 15, 2014

The family of Duncan settles with their malpractice blame with the US hospital that fell short.



Family and friends gather to honor Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who became the first victim to die of Ebola in the U.S. (Reuters)
By the time Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas on Sept. 28, he had already been sent home once from the hospital with antibiotics. Though he told staff he had traveled to West Africa, they didn’t think it necessary to admit him.
After returning home to his fiance’s family — which would later endure a 21-day quarantine — Duncan was brought back to the hospital in an ambulance after vomiting on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. After exposing two nurses to Ebola, he died Oct. 8.
Now, after alleging that Texas Presbyterian had not done right by Duncan, his family has reached what its attorneys called a “resolution” with the health-care facility.
According to a statement issued by the law offices of Miller Weisbrod, Duncan’s family will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning “regarding a resolution they have reached on behalf of the children and parents of the deceased with Texas Health Resources and all related entities,” as WFAA 8 reported.
Unlike some other Ebola patients provided state-of-the-art experimental treatments and swept to advanced medical facilities like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Duncan was poor. He had no insurance. And he was black.
A lawyer for the family of Thomas Duncan, the only Ebola patient in the United States to die, says the hospital that treated him will create a foundation in his name. (AP)
“We asked. We begged. We pleaded. I even offered my own blood, even though it wouldn’t do anything for him,” Duncan’s nephew Josephus Weeks told the Associated Press last month. “We requested everything we could think of to save Eric. They said no.”
One health-care expert questioned the choice of an experimental drug used to treat Duncan — and the delay in providing it.
“The guys who do what I do, working in this field, find it puzzling,” Thomas Geisbert, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas at Galveston consulted in two U.S. Ebola cases, told the AP. “It kind of came out of left field. I think the jury is still out on why this would have any activity against Ebola.”

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