Expert claims U.S. prepared to fight Ebola
BUTLER — A Butler native and infectious diseases expert agrees with the decision to return two Americans with the Ebola virus disease to the United States from West Africa for treatment, and that standard precautions eliminate any risk of the disease’s spread.
“Ebola is a very deadly infectious disease, but it’s not highly contagious,” Dr. Amesh Adalja said Tuesday. “It’s likely we’ll see an importation of Ebola somewhere in the United States. But an outbreak — that just won’t happen.”
The two American aid workers, Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, are in isolation at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital, getting an experimental drug so novel it has never been tested for safety in humans. Brantley, 33, arrived there Friday, and Writebol, 59, arrived Tuesday.
Both are improving, although it’s impossible to know whether their improvement is in response to the treatment or they are recovering on their own, as others who have survived Ebola have done.
Ebola outbreaks have a fatality rate of up to 90 percent, according to the World Health Organization.
The aid workers were infected while working in Liberia, one of four West African nations dealing with the world’s largest Ebola outbreak. The WHO this week reported 887 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria, and 1,603 reported cases have been confirmed.
Nearly all of the reported cases are in the neighboring countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
A Nigerian nurse has died of Ebola and the country has five other confirmed cases of the disease, Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said today.
The nurse had treated a man who flew into Lagos and later died of Ebola last month, Chukwu said in a statement handed to reporters in Abuja, the capital.
He said the five confirmed Ebola patients are being treated in isolation in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest city with 21 million people.
The five with the disease had direct contact with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, who was sick when he flew into Lagos and died five days later on July 25. Authorities are now following up with others who had contact with Sawyer to see if they are showing Ebola symptoms.
Adalja, an infectious diseases specialist affiliated with UPMC, said the Nigerian medical workers were caught off-guard — the Ebola outbreak was happening more than 1,200 miles away, and they probably treated the patient without realizing he was infected with the Ebola virus.
Adalja said that won’t happen in the United States, particularly in the aftermath of the 9-11 terror attacks in 2001. Five anthrax-related deaths heightened the American government’s awareness of viruses as potential weapons, he said. Ebola is a Class-A agent. The former Soviet Union and Iraq under Saddam Hussein both tried to develop weaponized versions of the virus.
Because of that, the United States government and military launched a long-standing research program, the result of which includes the antibody serum being given to Brantley and Writebol now.
Another result is nationwide awareness of the symptoms of Ebola infection. On Monday, a New York City hospital tested a man showing symptoms consistent with Ebola after returning recently from West Africa. The man was being treated in isolation while awaiting test results.
Other incidents of testing were reported Tuesday, including at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Ebola spreads only by contact with the blood or body fluids of an infected person, Adalja said. Simple precautions prevent its spread, he said, and precaution begins with awareness and planning.
“We’ve been preparing for it. Hospitals around the country already use isolation procedures,” Adalja said. “A lot of effort has gone into developing a prevention strategy. Now we’re seeing some of the fruits of that effort.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
