EbolaPrivate cleaning firms had to improvise when cleaning apartments of U.S. Ebola patients
Officials responsible for disinfecting the Ebola-infected homes of Thomas Eric Duncan’s fiancee, and of the two nurses he infected, relied on best decontamination practices, but note that an official manual for responding to a home contaminated with the Ebola virus was nonexistent at the time. OSHA recently announced official guidelines for “Cleaning and Decontamination of Ebola on Surfaces” for workers and employers in non-healthcare/non-laboratory settings.
Cleanup crews originally worked without guidelines at Ebola sites // Source: weeple.net
Officials responsible for disinfecting the Ebola-infected homes of Thomas Eric Duncan’s fiancee, and of the two nurses he infected, relied on best decontamination practices, but note that an official manual for responding to a home contaminated with the Ebola virus was nonexistent at the time. To clean up the apartment Duncan fell ill in, Dallas officials came up with a quick plan which included riding the apartment of a sixty-inch television. “That Samsung was one of the hardest cuts of our lives, but we were told to get rid of everything that could be replaced and we did,” said Brad Smith, vice president of Fort Worth-based CG Environmental (the Cleaning Guys), which decontaminated Louise Troh’s home at the apartment complex where Duncan became symptomatic with vomiting and diarrhea.
According to the Herald Democrat, at the time there were no manuals or guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on how to clean the infected apartment. “We’ve done lots of life-threatening jobs, but this was the unknown, and we didn’t take any risks,” Smith said. Throughout the apartment, only passports, a family Bible, and a few sentimental items were spared.
Hours after the Cleaning Guys were called back to decontaminate the apartment of Nina Pham, a nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for Duncan. The team was called off the job by the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which had assumed control from Dallas County and then assigned the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to oversee cleanup efforts. Protect Environmental Services, a state contractor was then issued the contract to clean Pham’s apartment. Protect Environmental Services general manager Richard Cameron said his team relied on existing virus decontamination guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), hospitals and various microbiology professors and laboratories, and “boiled them all down to create our own with the state and CDC.”
In New York City, a 10-person crew from the Bio Recovery Corp. was assigned to clean up the Harlem apartment of Dr. Craig Spencer, the city’s first Ebola patient.
OSHA recently announced official guidelines for “Cleaning and Decontamination of Ebola on Surfaces” for workers and employers in non-healthcare/non-laboratory settings. For disposal of waste from cleanup, OSHA recommends following guidelines issued by the CDC and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Hazardous Materials Regulations.
