Ebola has wreaked havoc on parts of Western Africa due to its staggeringly high mortality rate. Over 900 people have died from the recent outbreak of the virus. Though fears of the virus spreading to North America are high, health officials say the chance of that happening is very low.
Canada has overhauled how it handles infectious diseases since the SARS outbreak of 2003. In contrast, Ebola is both much more deadly yet easier to contain. Here’s how the health system would react if Ebola did make its way to Canada:
You land in Canada after a business trip to Sierra Leone and are asked at the border if you have any symptoms of illness. You feel fine and are allowed on your way.
But within a couple days you start to feel flu-like symptoms. By five days, it feels like malaria.
Ebola has an incubation period of two to 21 days, meaning people can travel across continents without realizing they have the virus. The good news is that a person is not contagious when the virus is in the incubation stage. The rest of the people on your flight are fine.
You go to the hospital, where officials will quickly ask you if you’ve travelled anywhere recently. From there, you’ll be put into isolation. Doctors will take extreme caution and use safety equipment while around you.
“The protocol is you assume the worst and take the highest precautions and then work your way down from there,” says Jason Tetro, a microbiologist and author of The Germ Code.
Everyone you’ve been in contact with since you landed will be contacted but not quarantined, if they’re healthy. They’ll be told to perform self-examinations for 21 days and report any symptoms of illness.
Meanwhile, your blood samples are sent to Ottawa where they confirm you have Ebola. A virus in your bloodstream is eating away at your cellular walls, causing your internal systems to collapse. Worse, it is sending out decoys to distract your immune system.
Even with modern medicine, you have less than a 50 per cent chance of surviving.
The protocol is you assume the worst and take the highest precautions and then work your way down from there
The blessing and curse of Ebola is that it is blood-borne. That makes it much easier to kill, but as a virus rather than bacteria, antibiotics are powerless on it.
That also makes it harder to transmit. Unlike respiratory illnesses that can become airborne, Ebola is spread through contact with infected bodily fluids.
This is where the fight to contain the disease becomes more about math than medicine. Mathematical models can show how an infectious disease would spread. Because Ebola is transmitted through direct contact and is slowed by days of incubation, it does not have the explosive outbreak potential of something like SARS.
“We would be able to catch it before it goes what we call two magnitudes,” said Tetro.
“So you may spread it to the people you had direct contact with. But it’s very low likelihood that they are going to spread it to the next level.
“You wouldn’t be able to get too deep into the population before it was stopped.”
If someone you know reports feeling any symptoms, they too will be isolated and undergo testing. Everyone that person has been in contact with will also be put on alert.
While the disease is horrific for anyone infected, health officials believe that by quickly isolating these people they can head off the spread of Ebola before it could become anything near widespread.
Of course, this is in itself a highly unlikely scenario. A person would have to contract the virus and be at a particular incubation stage at the time of entering Canada.
There is very little travel between West Africa and Nova Scotia so it is extremely unlikely that Ebola would reach the province, according to Todd Hatchette, director of virology and immunology at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax.
Officials stress that Canada is more prepared to deal with an infectious outbreak now than it ever has in the past. Since the SARS Commission issued its final report in 2006 about what went wrong with that disease, Canada has overhauled its approach to infectious diseases.