The Ebola explosive mix

My Orchids. Phalaneopsis. Photo ET

The Ebola explosive mix

With the recent appearance of an Ebola case in Dallas Texas, a complex confluence of logical deductions from a person who thinks he or she might be infected risk to defeat public health officials’ careful and meandering logic between appropriate preventive measures, education, and the belief that they should avoid creating a general panic and turmoil.

Unfortunately, both logics cannot be reconciled, and the onus lies on the government. An excess of prudence and political correctness, weighing words and levels of transparency in order to minimize the threat will eventually induce benign neglect at all levels and increase the problem. Over 2-3 days, the story of the Dallas case has evolved from not disclosing the infected person’s name nor the airlines used, from having been in contact with vaguely 12-18 people, because of “privacy” issues, to what seems to be a higher level of alert today. We now know the patient’s name, the name of the airlines and the itinerary, and by now 80 people seem to have been identified as having been in contact with the patient.

All this is happening after the well-publicized success in repatriating and treating a US doctor and a nurse who contracted Ebola while volunteering in West Africa. Their chances of survival staying in West Africa had to be evaluated as dramatically lower than going through the complicated logistical effort to get them home for an eventually successful treatment.

The story of the healing capabilities in the US cannot be lost on the populations exposed in West Africa. They have also been educated that the incubation takes a couple of weeks before signs of the illness show up. If you think you have been exposed, you have life and death decisions to make, among those the preeminent one: where do they say people got healed? In the US of course.

I don’t know whether that was the assessment made by the patient in the Dallas case: I was exposed, I’m probably infected, I better go to the US where people get healed, and wait it out there. If ever symptoms show up, I go to the ER.

That possible scenario is a huge public safety and public health challenge, from how to handle the related travel, transfer and US entry questions. And as the Dallas case shows, health professionals need to adhere scrupulously to the adequate protocols. 

The threat can be handled with realistic policies and discipline in applying them.