431
this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
431 points (98.2% liked)
News
23275 readers
3519 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Uhhh - so two employees were exposed to a yet unknown substance that has to be at least considered to be harmful and were even allowed to refuse medical treatment? Am I missing something here?
shit they'll probably be charged for the medical treatment. Every Americans knee-jerk reaction these days is avoid the hospital and ambulances for fear of medical debt wiping us out.
Until we know what the substance was we could be missing a lot. The letter could have been more of a threat than an attempt. Maybe it's just baby powder or maybe they just didn't breathe any of it in. The powder is probably just presued harmful until proven otherwise. Does that help clarify? In my opinion this article shouldn't have been released in this form. It's to wordy with to little information.
Yeah, the article isn't all that great. Still, the fact that the two exposed employees refused medical treatment suggests to me, that the nature of the substance at least wasn't yet known at that time, since it shouldn't be necessary to even offer that, if the substance was known to be something harmless like baby powder.
Cheers, though!
A: You think we should call the ambulance? B: Nah, I didn't even touch it, and it's probably nothing anyway.
"Refused medical treatment"
B: Nah, I cannot afford medical care. I'm only covered if my life is clearly in danger.
For the record, you can always call an ambulance for people.
Even without their consent. And even in the us, there won’t be a cost incurred until they accept treatment (which is why you wind up with absurdly expensive bandaids.)
So if you think somebody might need some help, it’s better to call than not- this is particularly true if you may have some liability.
Also, every state has some version of a law that requires calling for aid (that is satisfied by reporting to 911). They’re typically referred to as Good Samaritan laws.
(If they refuse treatment to professionals, that’s their business, you’re clear of further liability; if the ambulance wants to insist they can either call cops and force the matter; or wait till they go unconscious and exploit implied consent.)
Putting it like that, yeah, sounds about right.
You have the right to refuse treatment at any time you want.
Now, there may be other things going on, like observation and isolation. There’s not a lot that can be done anyhow; until symptoms of something start showing up, most likely the fastest way to verify what treatment is appropriate is to run tests on the powder.
That’s the kind of thing that gets put at the front of the line.
Probably just cornstarch or baby powder. But also, both those could conceivably be a carrier for something.
If I was their boss I’d go with the “and let you spread it to your family?” Guilt trip instead.
If it was actually anthrax, it has an incubation period of 1 to 3 days and a prodromal phase that can last anywhere from 1 to 6 days. Their exposure would have been inhalation which does carry the worst forms of the illness and the worst prognosis, but they'd have at least a couple days before symptoms start showing up and there are antitoxin and immunoglobulin treatments available. There's not really a post-exposure prophylaxis, per se, and giving someone the treatments unnecessarily would be incredibly expensive.
And I just wonder why these guys aren't wearing at least gloves and an n95?
Yeah, that's a really good point.