You might have missed it, because we're barely talking about it in the United States, but the African Ebola epidemic has still not died down: the World Health Organization identified 99 new cases in its most recent status report. And as long as the disease persists, the possibility exists that it could spread back out of that confined area to other countries. Which makes it a good time to consider several new reports of what happened to US health care workers involved in responding to Ebola, and how that experience still affects their lives.
Short version: Of two who contracted Ebola and survived, one remains ill and fears she was manipulated, and the other, though well, feels he was misrepresented and stigmatized. Both worry their experience will dissuade others from volunteering in turn. And a major new government report backs them up.
The Dallas Morning News reported Saturday on Nina Pham, one of two nurses infected by Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian who flew into the United States not knowing he had Ebola. After developing the disease and being treated by her own hospital, Pham was flown to the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, where she was treated with experimental drugs and the blood serum of US physician Kent Brantly, who had already recovered. (Her colleague Amber Vinson got similar treatment at Emory University.) Pham survived and returned home, but months later, she struggles with liver disorders, insomnia, hair loss, what sounds like post-traumatic shock, and an uncertain medical future.
Pham is suing the hospital where she worked and was treated, Texas Health Presbyterian, for putting its staff at risk. From the story by Jennifer Emily:
A few days before that story, another US health care workers who treated victims of the diseases and then developed Ebola published his own account. Dr. Craig Spencer was healthy when he flew home to Manhattan; as requested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he took his temperature twice a day, looking for any spike that would indicate he was developing symptoms and becoming infectious. On the day his temperature rose, he checked himself into Bellevue Hospital. He writes in the New England Journal of Medicine:
Spencer was hospitalized for two weeks; his recovery rendered the US Ebola-free. (Kaci Hickox, who shortly afterward was forcibly quarantined in a tent by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, never had Ebola.) He worries though that his experience will deter other health care workers from volunteering where they are needed:
Spencer's frustration is echoed in a report released last week by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which examines the arguments for quarantine (and other ethics-based issues such as whether to send help to affected countries and how to conduct clinical trials of treatments). The commission, composed of medical and legal faculty from 11 universities, comes down strongly against imposing quarantines on people such as Spencer who are not infectious, and in favor of extending more support to health care workers such as Pham.
In releasing the report, he Commission's chair, Amy Gutmann, PhD, president of the University of Pennsylvania, expressed its conclusions forcefully: