EbolaThe U.S. is not at risk of an Ebola epidemic: Experts

The United States is highly unlikely to suffer an Ebola outbreak, according to remarks from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who discovered he had Ebola days after arriving in Dallas following a trip to Liberia, has been placed in quarantine at Dallas’s Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Although U.S. hospitals have not had to deal with Ebola in the past, Western health institutions have studied the disease since it was first discovered in 1976 in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, positioning the CDC better to inform the public about Ebola, its symptoms, and how it spreads. In Liberia, the heart of the West African Ebola outbreak, the average citizen knows little about how Ebola spreads. Government Executive reports that some people have avoided seeking treatment, afraid that medical workers are responsible for spreading the disease. In Boya, a town in northern Liberia’s Lofa County, healthcare workers have been threatened with knives and stones, and some villages have even tried to block roads to keep medical workers out.

Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone had never experienced a case of Ebola until this recent outbreak, so governments were unprepared to educate residents. Already weak healthcare systems were also no match for the thousands of hospital beds and quarantine rooms needed to isolate infected individuals. “Our health delivery system is under stress,” said Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Even when Ebola patients die, some West African burial practices help facilitate the spread of Ebola among healthy villagers. In many villages, a dead body is not directly taken to a funeral home, placed in a coffin, and buried. Local tradition calls for family members to wash, touch, and kiss the bodies of their dead loved ones before the bodies are buried. Sometimes, even the burial mats are reused for future burials.

The hygiene measures implemented in the United States are not common in the West African villages, where Ebola has affected thousands of residents. Most public restrooms in the United States have signs that warn customers and employees to wash their hands before exiting. Most Ebola-affected villages lack a clean water source to begin with. To educate residents, volunteers have been passing out pamphlets and flyers promoting proper personal hygiene to limit the spread of Ebola.

In the United States, Eric Duncan is currently receivingbrincidofovir, an experimental drug that has shown promise against Ebola in test tubes. Most healthcare centers in West Africa lack the basic medical supplies and personnel to slow the spread of Ebola, so infected residents are given intravenous fluids, and undergoing treatments for other infections if they arise.