Remembering Ebola Victims Health Workers..

Ebola Has Killed More Than 200 Doctors, Nurses, And Other Healthcare Workers Since June.

 

Williams Mills , Contributor

I write sharp takes on the health, policy and wonk news of the day. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Ebola has now infected multiple people in America: The first two homegrown cases of Ebola are a pair of nurses who got sick after treating Thomas Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
Both nurses with Ebola — Nina Pham and Amber Joy Vinson — were among the 70-plus staff who encountered Duncan during his 10-day stay at Dallas's Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. However, several staff on Wednesday anonymously told reporters that the nurses were not given sufficient protection against the risk of Ebola.
(A person can become infected with Ebola after being in close proximity with a visibly sick Ebola patient, and specifically by making contact with an infected person's bodily fluids.)
Although Duncan was admitted to the hospital on September 28, having traveled from West Africa and suffering from common Ebola symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea, staff weren't told to wear protective gear to guard themselves against Ebola until September 30. That's when tests formally confirmed that Duncan was infected with Ebola, and had been contagious for nearly a week.

The allegations that the Dallas nurses didn't have sufficient protections against Ebola are disturbing — more on those in a second — but the infection pattern keeps with a sad trend: A disproportionate number of people who were sickened with Ebola in West Africa were health care workers, too.
Doctors Without Borders this week said that 16 of its staff had contracted Ebola in the current outbreak, and nine had died from the disease. Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, the doctor who heroically led Sierra Leone's fight against Ebola, got sick and died in July; his colleagues opted not to give him the experimental ZMapp cocktail, which appears to have helped treat several Ebola patients.

 

We've been tracking the Ebola outbreak at the Advisory Board Daily Briefing, and my colleagues Juliette Mullin and Rich Van Haste have monitored how the current Ebola outbreak has hit health care workers especially hard.
Around the globe, about 400 health care staff have contracted Ebola, and more than 230 have died.

Caring for Ebola patients is complicated; the patients are highly acute and need constant monitoring from health care staff. But to do so, doctors and nurses must undertake comprehensive protections to ensure that fluids expelled by Ebola patients don't touch their skin or get accidentally ingested.
And as Juliette points out, writing at the Daily Briefing, Ebola patients become more contagious at end-of-life—which poses a further risk to the nurses who care for them.
Some hospitals have been up to the challenge. While Emory Healthcare has been able to treat three different Ebola patients without any staff becoming sickened by the disease, that hospital has dedicated, high-level expertise in fighting problems like Ebola. Emory's one of just several hospitals across the nation with an isolated infectious disease unit, for instance.
Amber Vinson, one of the Dallas nurses sickened by Ebola, is now being taken to Emory for care.
But Texas Health's level of preparation is probably more representative of the average hospital. "What are the chances America's first Ebola patient ended up at the *only* hospital that would make mistakes?" health care economist and writer Austin Frakt ruefully asked on Twitter. "Point is, errors are everywhere."
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