EbolaU.S., European doctors, health worker rush to Africa to fight Ebola outbreak

Foreign health workers and medical staff are traveling to West Africa to help communities battle the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record. More than sixty local medical staff who treated Ebola patients, roughly 8 percent of the fatalities, have died in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.

G. Richards Olds, dean of medicine at University of California-Riverside, compared doctors working with Ebola patients to doctors who helped fight the plague in medieval Europe. “This is one of the few cases in modern times of true healthcare heroism,” Olds said. “They’re taking some significant risks, as you can see, to help others.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recently announced that the United States will send fifty public health officials to West Africa in the next thirty days to help fight the disease. The World Health Organization also plans to fly hundreds of medical staff into West Africa to assist communities who are struggling to stem the spread of the disease.

Ebola is not airborne, so when a doctor or nurse falls ill after treating a patient, it is usually attributed to failure to execute proper disposal of bodily fluids, including blood and vomit.

Doctors Without Borders (DWB) nurse Monia Sayah, who returned home to the United States after months of working in Guinea treating Ebola patients, said she felt safe in her protective medical clothing despite the fact that many health workers had died from the disease. “We have very strict measures to avoid infection. We use a set of behaviors. It’s very important the way we dress up and the way you dress down. We use a buddy system to make sure you don’t make a mistake when you are putting on or taking off the gown,” Sayah said. The Times notes that DWB has never had an Ebola fatality.

On concerns regarding whether Americans should worry about U.S. hospitals being infected with Ebola, Frieden said on Twitter, “any U.S. hospital following CDC’s infection control recommendations can safely manage a patient w/ Ebola hemorrhagic fever.”

A 2012 U.S. study funded by the Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) developed an Ebola antibody treatment that protected non-human primates from the disease. In August 2012, however, the Pentagon suspended funding for two companies with leading vaccine candidates, Sarepta and Tekmira. With this year’s outbreak, the National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease unit and the Food and Drug Administration have begun working to test vaccines as early as September after trials on primates showed positive results.