Health workers use Tabasco sauce for Ebola training

25 October 2014 - 16:37 By Times LIVE
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After numerous cases of medical professionals contracting Ebola from the patients they were treating, one hospitals has come up with an innovative way to teaching their staff how not to contract the virus using Tabasco sauce.

The Ebola unit at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the US are using fake patients who've been sprayed at random with the hot pepper sauce according to reports by ABC news.

Health workers were asked to treat the fake Ebola patients as if they were really infected with the virus. At the end of the exercise they were asked to remove their protective gear.

They were then told to rub their eyes and touch their lips to determine whether or not they were free of Tabasco sauce which would be how the Ebola virus would be transmitted.

Tabasco sauce is produced out of Louisiana by McIlhenny Co. from red peppers called Capsicum frutescens.

When human skin comes into contact with Capsicum, the 'spicy chemical' in the peppers, it will tingle as the brain's pain and temperature receptors are activated at the same time.

The hospital workers said they did not have any burning sensation which is how they knew they had not been infected.

Once Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian citizen was diagnosed with Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, nurses Nina Pham  26  and Amber Vinson 29 both contracted the deadly virus.

No one is sure how the nurses may have contracted the deadly virus, but it is suspected it may have been when they removed their protective cloths.

The Daily Mail reported that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said during a news conference, that removing the protective gear in the correct was not easy.

'When you have gone into contaminated gloves, masks or other things to remove those without risk of contaminated material touching you and being then on your clothes or face or skin and leading to an infection is critically important and not easy to do right,'

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