County health departments are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best as the Ebola outbreak, which originated in West Africa, continues to spread. KSMU’s Simone Cook has more.
Thomas Eric Duncan was the first person diagnosed with Ebola on American soil and is currently receiving treatment at a hospital in Dallas, Texas.
While there is not an immediate threat to southwest Missouri, the Springfield-Greene County Health Department and local hospitals are working hand in hand to be prepared.
Kendra Findley, the county’s administrator of Community Health and Epidemiology, says should it be determined that a patient has contracted the virus, officials would first isolate the person and protect those around the patient.
“The Health Department would then start a process of contact tracing, so we would identify anybody who had close contact with the patient and talk to them about what type of contact they had, how long did they live in the household, just a series of questions to determine how much at risk they would be due to their exposure to the patient,” Findley said.
Findley says both the Health Department and hospitals would call upon various departments to ensure the safety of the patient as well as the wellbeing and safety of other individuals in the area.
“You can prepare with your partners and we do that on a regular basis, we talk to our partners with Emergency management, with the airport with fire, police, with our area hospitals, for different scenarios. If we are talking about a catastrophic event or the introduction of an illness.”
With all of the media attention on Ebola, there are many misconceptions about how the virus is spread, according to Findley. She says the virus is only spread through direct contact of body fluids, such as vomit or blood. Once inside the body, what Ebola actually does is similar to what other viruses do; they latch onto a host cell.
“So it will get into that host cell and start replicating and then the body’s immune response to that viral invader, it will respond to it and Ebola has a way of somewhat hiding from the immune system, so it can hide long enough for enough replication of the virus that the body then has a hard time fighting it off.”
The World Health Organization reports that as of October 3, there have been over 7,400 cases of Ebola in West Africa, with more than 3,400 of those resulting in deaths.
