Ebola preparedness: on avoiding making a scary virus scarier.

Now that the first US cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) have appeared and, at this writing, have been resolved (mostly favorably), the atmosphere surrounding this virus may be able to mutate from paralyzing paranoia to a functional level of fear and loathing. EVD is frightening, but in the United States its risk is statistically almost negligible; if risk perception reflected quantifiable likelihood, patients, politicians, and pundits here would be focusing on influenza and other familiar hazards instead. Yet Ebola has become the movie star of pathogens, outshining Lassa, Marburg, and its other relatives, publicized and mythologized out of all proportion to its knowable characteristics.

In West Africa, of course, it is a clear and present danger, and the work being done against it there by institutions such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders), the International Rescue Committee, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is of enormous global concern. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has appropriately taken the lead (and, in some situations, taken the flak). Spreading practical knowledge faster than the virus itself can move is essential to prevent EVD from gaining a foothold outside the initial affected area—and, with luck, bringing its effect within that area under control as well.

“Part of what makes it difficult is that the symptoms are inherently scary,” said Emmanuel d'Harcourt, MD, senior health director of the International Rescue Committee. Hemorrhage as vascular tissues break down can be significant; the mortality rate approaches 90% when untreated. “But if you think about it, there are other diseases that are scary, too. I mean, tetanus is a scary disease. If you have someone who's very sick from avian flu, that's very scary as well…. The other thing is it's not familiar. If I'm to be honest with myself, I was nervous the first time I went to Liberia after the epidemic. Understandably, but not rationally. Rationally, I should have been more worried about car accidents, or malaria, or other things that are a greater risk.”

Rational Action Amid Intercultural Obstacles

The current cluster of Zaire-species EVD cases in West Africa—the largest since Ebola was first identified in 1976 and now an international public health emergency, as declared last August by WHO—nevertheless poses challenges to the medical community and to communities beyond the affected zone. Balancing clinical management, contact tracing, and appropriately targeted case isolation requires collaboration among physicians, researchers, and local authorities official and unofficial, as well as the media and cultural sectors of the societies involved, perhaps to a greater degree than with any other emerging pathogen. Because beliefs about Ebola's mode of transmission affect behaviors that in turn can either stymie or amplify that transmission, there is no hard-and-fast line between clinical considerations and cultural contexts. As personal protective equipment (PPE) is essential for physical safety, scientific skepticism about circulating misinformation is essential in treatment and containment efforts.

The outbreak in West Africa has appeared against a background of well-understood resource limits, violent conflicts, and governmental or infrastructural breakdown. MSF spokesperson Sandra Murillo emphasizes the sharp contrast between the medical interventions that are possible in the directly affected nations and those in the United States, where lifesaving components of supportive care (rehydration, ventilation, electrolyte monitoring, and dialysis) are routinely available. Despite those obstacles, African and Western personnel working in the field since 1976 have generated extensive knowledge about protective measures. The cultural contexts complicating EVD management are less clearly understood, but improved communications in both directions between West African societies and the industrialized West, experienced observers contend, are essential for appropriate containment on both fronts.

Much has been written about the need for rational information and procedures to replace mystical beliefs about transmission, unsanitary burial practices, bush meat consumption (not an exclusively African practice: illegally imported bush meat, which some consider a delicacy, is reportedly available in the United States, though Newsweek investigators were unable to find it in New York markets), and disinformation about medical personnel’s being a cause of EVD rather than a defense against it (in part a legacy of colonialism and mutual distrust). Scientifically unsupportable practices abound on this side of the Atlantic as well: calls for quarantine of asymptomatic travelers, informed commentators agree, have no scientific basis. (Calling the quarantine controversy “as much psychological and political as it is scientific,” Stephen S. Morse, PhD, said. “I'm not a big fan of quarantine, except in cases where people might otherwise be lost to follow-up if you don't believe they'll be compliant.”) Although Western knowledge and resources are indispensable to Africans, physicians who have worked on the front lines against Ebola also recommend humility and intercultural competence on the part of Westerners.

“One of the key pieces of advice is not to come in thinking that we have the solution. An effective community organizer, who may have a nursing degree or no medical degree, is probably going to save many more lives than any foreign physician,” noted Dr. d’Harcourt. “There've been so few images of competent Sierra Leoneans and Liberians in the media, but the reality is that some of the progress that we're seeing now in big parts of Liberia and in parts of Sierra Leone has to do with the actions of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans…. It can't be a big brother/little brother dynamic where you're the elder sibling. You have to come in saying, ‘I've got to find somebody who in this context is smarter [and] more effective than me.'”

Thomas W. Geisbert, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and a specialist in emerging viruses such as Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa, has seen creative, useful local containment efforts in affected sites. “When we were in Republic of Congo a number of years ago, I thought they were doing a really good job with the community outreach and education. They were going into communities, and they had these teams of dancers that were doing these little skits that were teaching people ‘Don't touch the bodies; don't pick up bush meat off the forest floor.'”

A potent and underused weapon against Ebola, Dr. d’Harcourt suggested, is the African diaspora. Communities of immigrants from African nations appear throughout the United States, such as the “Little Liberia” in Clifton, Staten Island, the home neighborhood of the International Rescue Committee's shipping clerk, Dr. d’Harcourt reported, noting that this coworker has provided extensive intercultural information that has aided the organization's response to the outbreak in that nation. Hospital and relief personnel who have built positive relations with comparable groups, such as Sierra Leonean–Americans in Harlem, Guinean-Americans in Washington, DC, or Malian-Americans in Chicago, are in a strengthened position to communicate clearly, draw on local knowledge, dispel misinformation, counteract stigmas, and cultivate allies and interpreters among these communities' trusted leaders.

Thanks a Lot, Hollywood

The key fact about Ebola, virologists and epidemiologists emphasize, is also the most widely misunderstood: it is spread by direct or fomite-mediated contact with body fluids or infected animals and is not airborne in the sense influenza is (with particles of 100 μm or smaller, inhalable beyond distances at which larger droplets cannot travel). The Ebola virus has a basic reproduction number (R0) ranging from 1.51 in Guinea and 1.59 in Liberia to 2.53 in Sierra Leone, far less infectious than rubeola, pertussis, smallpox, or rubella and somewhat less so than influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or HIV. Public confusion about the distinction between fluid or droplet and aerosol transmission, and about viruses' mutation patterns more generally—and thus about how contagious Ebola really is—is partially attributable to a movie.

Dr. Morse, epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and editor of the foundational text Emerging Viruses (1993), was among several scientific consultants on the film Outbreak (1995), a loose fictionalization of Richard Preston's 1994 book The Hot Zone. The screenwriters, he notes, had a gripping enough concept from the outset; they didn't need to include a scene in which Dustin Hoffman's character deduces that the film's pathogen (not Ebola itself, which is mentioned elsewhere in the dialogue, but “Motaba,” a hemorrhagic-fever virus resembling it) mutates to become capable of airborne transmission. They overrode Dr. Morse's advice anyway. “The script was rewritten several times because it was thought not to be paranoid enough the first time,” he recalled. “We all had suggestions for how they could do this without making the virus suddenly mutate magically. But unfortunately, it's just too tempting for Hollywood to do that.”

“Nature can do things we've never expected,” Dr. Morse said, “but there is no virus in history that we know of that's ever mutated to change its route of transmission. And for that matter, HIV has had many more opportunities to do this, and much more reason, because it's in macrophages…and it's not changed its route of transmission, or really very [many] of its characteristics, despite years of opportunities to mutate. So I don't think Ebola is going to be the exception.”

“The best evidence I have [that Ebola is not airborne],” he continued, “is that MSF, which I think does tend to be quite cautious, [sends] people to do contact tracing with known and possible contacts with Ebola patients, some of who may not yet be symptomatic and some of whom could be. And these field people do not wear PPE. They're dressed normally. They stand about 6 feet away, and of course they don't touch the patient, which is awkward in that society. They're doing questionnaires and so on. And to the best of my knowledge, not a single one has become infected.”

Ebola is not a mystery virus and has been studied more extensively than many. The current strain is “behaving in an identical way to other viruses that have caused other outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa,” said Arjun Srinivasan, MD (CAPT, USPHS), associate director for health care–associated infection prevention programs in the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion. No novel features are appearing in “the duration of illness, the symptom onsets, the type of symptoms, the case fatality rate, [or] the reproductive number…and we know from past experience that these viruses are not transmitted via an airborne route.”

At a panel on hospitals' preparation for Ebola cases and potential pandemics last November 18, organized jointly by the New York Society for Health Planning and the American Institute of Architects–New York chapter's Health Facilities and Design for Risk and Reconstruction committees, physicians, executives, and architects associated with designated Ebola-response hospitals shared extensive practical pointers about Ebola pathophysiology, appropriate procedures, and facility preparation. Robert Bristow, MD, medical director of emergency management at New York–Presbyterian Hospital (and a colleague of Craig Spencer, MD, who became the city's EVD index patient after acquiring the virus as an MSF volunteer treating patients in Guinea), emphasized the relation of infectiousness and timing: “It's relatively hard to transmit in the early stages of the disease. Someone actually has to be symptomatic and sick, and then you have to have direct contact with some of their secretions. So the good news is that early on, it's relatively hard to transmit and actually contract the disease. Later on, in the treatment phase, when a patient's really sick, it's very easy…. Just to put this in perspective, 1 drop of secretions later on in the disease with Ebola has billions of virus particles” compared with about 1,000 HIV particles in a drop from a patient late in that disease.

“You can never say never, and it's probably how we define ‘aerosol,'” cautioned Dr. Geisbert. “But it's not like influenza, where I'm standing next to you and the virus could be transmitted from me to you through very small droplets.” It is still prudent to avoid a symptomatic patient's sneeze, which contains larger droplets, he noted. Whenever reporters ask the transmission-mode-mutation question, however, “I turn their question around…. Give me an example of a virus that started out as not being transmitted by the air and suddenly acquired that mutation. I'm not aware of any.”

Avoidable Errors and Constructive Responses

Dr. Geisbert suggested that the experience of the late Thomas Eric Duncan supports the inference that for all its lethality, Ebola is relatively hard to catch. Duncan is the Liberian patient who had helped transport a patient in Monrovia who later died of EVD, and whose admission to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, initial next-day discharge without an Ebola diagnosis, and subsequent readmission culminated in the first EVD case recognized within the United States, his own death, and the infection of 2 nurses (both of whom have received appropriate treatment and 21-day monitoring, and have recovered).

“If this virus was spread a lot like influenza was spread,” Dr. Geisbert speculated, “we'd have a hell of a lot more people infected, right?” Nurses Nina Pham and Amber Joy Vinson, who inevitably had close contact with Duncan, tested positive; among Duncan's other known or possible contacts, 177 in total by the CDC's count, all have completed surveillance, with no other positive test results. Dr. Bristow, discussing the New York case and the factors that have contributed to a better outcome than in Dallas, observed that no close personal contacts of either Duncan or Dr. Spencer, even domestic partners who shared their beds, have tested positive.

“What happened in Dallas was obviously a difficult situation, but I think it taught people a lot,” Dr. Geisbert said. “I think one of the things that [matter] more than any other thing is looking at the travel history, and the signs and symptoms of Ebola are nonspecific in the beginning…. All of a sudden, you ask that question, ‘Oh, you've been in Sierra Leone or Guinea?' Sirens and whistles and bells should be going off.”

Although Texas Health Presbyterian officials have not clarified the events in detail and did not respond to inquiries for this article, lay-media reports have outlined multiple lapses from recommended procedures. The CDC responded to the Dallas case by tightening its recommendations for use of PPE. “We don't know exactly what happened in Dallas that led to the transmission of Ebola to those 2 nurses who contracted the infection from the care of the patient,” said Dr. Srinivasan. “What we do know is that the guidance that we had previously did not prevent the transmission of Ebola to those 2 nurses, and that was one of the factors that prompted a revisit of those guidelines and some revisions to the guidance that was based not only on what happened in the experiences in Dallas but also…on the experience of the care of the initial patients who had Ebola virus disease who were cared for in US hospitals.”

“What's common to all patients who are coming from areas where they could possibly have been exposed to Ebola is that they're all being monitored by public health authorities,” Dr. Srinivasan added. “I think that's obviously a key both for preventing the spread of Ebola [and] in making sure that those patients who develop symptoms get into care as quickly as possible.”

If nothing else, the Duncan case provides a wake-up call for US hospitals. The belief that any emergency department (ED) would recognize Ebola and send a patient for proper care turned out to be erroneous, in part because “in the previous administration, there was a lot of emphasis on hospital preparedness for bioterror events,” Dr. Morse noted, citing exercises for smallpox attacks. “Most of them are not prepared for Ebola, and we might have thought otherwise, first of all because of all these hospital preparedness exercises over the last 10 years or so, and secondly because of all the attention that Ebola had gotten and all the messages being directed to health care workers and physicians and providers from CDC. I would have thought that with all that saturation, people would have a high level of suspicion or high level of awareness of the possibility of Ebola, especially in people coming from affected countries, or [who] might have a travel history. And, you know, that assumption is obviously wrong. So I would say most hospitals are probably better off not getting into this, but arranging in advance for how they would transport such a patient to a place that did feel it was prepared.”

In the Unlikely Event…

Preparedness in any ED begins, but does not end, with the essential steps outlined in the CDC's “Identify, Isolate, Inform” guidelines and algorithm for triage, evaluation, isolation, reporting, and PPE use. Mark Jarrett, MD, MBA, professor of medicine at Hofstra North Shore–Long Island Jewish School of Medicine and another participant in the New York Society for Health Planning/American Institute of Architects event, emphasized planning and thorough, repetitive training for all staff because errors proliferate when unfamiliar situations force staff to get up to speed quickly. Even when the CDC's protocols are summarized visually in flow sheets, he said, “what we've learned is, they look very simple; when the staff has a patient, they get very nervous, and this becomes very complicated…. It's all about the staff: if you're going to take care of a patient, the staff has to be protected, so you really need to have easy directions on what to do.” (Dr. Morse added that “normally you would put your most experienced people onto working with Ebola patients, given the bad history we've seen to date.”)

PPE procedures require practical training in advance; for personnel becoming newly accustomed to the steps involved in donning, wearing, and doffing these hot, awkward garments, performing routine clinical tasks such as taking vital signs while wearing them is no trivial matter. “Médecins Sans Frontières,” noted Dr. Morse, “has been setting the standard for this. They have had the fewest casualties, if you will, and I think the best safety record. And a lot of the current guidelines really are very much like what MSF is doing.” Donning and doffing PPE, he says, is “a complex operation, especially the doffing part, because nobody enjoys it very much. It's counterintuitive, and the first thing you want to do, of course, is to get out of it.” MSF uses a buddy system for the process, and CDC guidelines are similar: anyone donning or doffing the equipment operates slowly and methodically under the watch of at least 1 trained and experienced monitor, who checks for correct procedures, any exposed areas during donning, and any evidence of contamination during doffing. It cannot be rushed and may take roughly half an hour.

“The greatest danger comes when you're not suspecting things. So when you're actually in an Ebola treatment unit, you're actually quite safe, relatively speaking,” said Dr. d’Harcourt. “There are procedures in place. So the biggest mental shift or thing you have to worry about is the patient who you didn't consider might have had Ebola…. For every Thomas Eric Duncan who walks into an emergency room and actually has Ebola, there's gonna be, in the US, thousands, probably millions of people who walk in and who don't have it. So preparing for 1 in a million is harder than preparing for 1 in a thousand, in a way.” For most EDs, in which an Ebola case is more likely 1 in a million, a related implication of the Duncan case—in which a nurse did note his recent arrival from Africa, but the information did not reach the attending physician—is that for all patients with fever or other potential EVD symptoms, travel history is critical, and health-records systems must convey this history clearly to any physician involved in the differential diagnosis.