With the continuous efforts to eradicate the problem brought by Ebola, experts have recently come up with a new scorecard, which has been designed to analyzing Ebola patients from the most recent outbreak in West Africa. Experts behind the new 'scorecard' said that it may help a number of health professionals to quickly decide who needs additional care to survive the virus in future epidemics.In their latest report published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Mary-Anne Hartley, of the international charity GOAL Global and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, together with her colleagues said that doctors might now be able to improve the odds of surviving by looking for a few warning signs in people who need to be treated more intensively.
New 'Scorecard': The Key For Ebola?
In one of her statements reported by Newsweek Online, as a scientist who was said to be collecting data during the Ebola virus outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2015, Mary-Anne Hartley said that in order to determine who will deteriorate the fastest, it is just but vital to have an objective measure to decide. This instance has then allegedly led Hartley to create a scoring system that calculates the severity of an Ebola case at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, where she studies infectious diseases. As what experts claim, if by any chance the virus comes back, this simple prognostic tool could save lives since experts would already have the idea on what are the necessary steps to do preventing the virus from further spreading.
Furthermore, Hartley has reportedly created two scorecards, one for diagnosis and one for daily rounds of hospitalized patients. It was found that each of which assigns points for pertinent characteristics, such as age, the amount of virus in the bloodstream (the "viral load"), symptoms and how long a patient had those symptoms before any medical intervention has been applied. Consequently, it was found that the scorecard has accurately predicted 97 percent of Ebola deaths at or soon after diagnosis.
Debunking Ebola
Meanwhile, according to reports revealed by Science News, there are several top risk factors for dying from Ebola. One of which, as what experts say is through a high viral load, wherein patients having lots of virus in their blood were 12.6 times as likely to die as those with a low viral load. Ultimately, experts claim that the sooner people seeks for treatment after symptoms of Ebola appeared, the earlier were they to be more likely seen to recover from the infection.
