Spain on pins and needles as it awaits clarity on Ebola
By Barbara Kollmeyer
MarketWatch.com
Oct 7, 2014
MADRID (MarketWatch) — In the capital and largest city of Spain, alarm and questions were growing among its 3 million–plus inhabitants over how a country with a modern, reputable health-care system has found itself in crisis over a deadly disease previously associated almost exclusively with West Africa.
“I am totally panicked,” said Isabel Alonso Paloma, a retiree who lives near Plaza España, one of the city’s largest and most popular plazas.
Spaniards went to bed Monday with the shocking news that a nurse’s aide in Madrid had become infected with Ebola after attending to an African-based missionary who died in hospital. Hers is the first known case of Ebola infection outside of West Africa. Tuesday hasn’t brought much better news, as the aide’s husband is now quarantined amid a stream of reports about additional potential cases of the disease in Spain.
Paloma’s husband, Roberto Acuña, a self-employed 67-year-old Madrid native, was angry as well as panicking, saying the country’s health minister, Ana Mato, should resign. “The least bit of negligence in any process is deadly. Today we have the news — this is negligence. The first responsibility lies with the minister.”
Acuña’s anger was echoed in social media via #MatoDimisión, a hashtag calling for Mato’s resignation from her cabinet post, while the online newspaper El Confidencial had nearly 20,000 votes — 88% of its straw poll — calling on her to step down. Some media outlets reported that the medical team caring for the missionary and a priest who had been brought back from Africa and eventually died used gloves held together by adhesive tape and carried waste out of rooms via elevators used by other personnel.
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