By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor
U.S. hospitals have not seen a case of Ebola virus disease since November 11, 2014, when Dr. Craig Spencer was discharged from Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. While the number of new infections has declined dramatically in the West African countries where the 2014–2015 epidemic began, it is virtually certain that the disease will continue to resurface.
This epidemic was by far the largest and most geographically widespread Ebola epidemic to date, with approximately 28,000 cases (suspected, probable, or confirmed) and more than 11,000 deaths in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, the three hardest-hit countries. The seven other countries affected account for a combined total of 34 confirmed (and two probable) cases and 15 deaths.
According to a recent WHO report, these numbers include (through March of this year) 815 confirmed or probable cases among health care workers, more than half of whom were nurses or nurses’ aides. (Doctors and medical students made up about 12% of total health care worker cases.)
This epidemic has been, for some, a wake-up call about the ease of global disease transmission. The ever-increasing movement of humans and animals over and between continents has created what virologist Nathan Wolfe refers to as a “giant microbial mixing vessel.” Before U.S. health care collides with the next deadly virus, it might be helpful to review some of what we’ve learned from these events.
- As Paul Farmer, a physician with decades of experience in outbreak control, emphasized late last year: “weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence or a previously unknown mode of transmission, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread.”
- People with Ebola are more likely to survive when they have access to critical care services—care that is unavailable (or inaccessible) in many countries.
- In monitoring the first large cohort of Ebola survivors, we are learning about possible residual effects of Ebola, including eye pain, blurred vision, hearing loss, swallowing difficulties, arthralgias, sleep problems, neurological changes, and memory loss and confusion. The virus can persist in semen for at least nine months. Pauline Cafferkey, a Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, developed meningitis last month, 10 months after she was thought to have recovered from the infection. Ebola virus was detected in her cerebral spinal fluid.
- More than 30 years ago, people with HIV and the nurses who cared for them were often shunned by family, friends, and coworkers. Neither Ebola nor HIV is spread by casual contact (here’s CDC information on what’s known about transmission risks), but experience during this Ebola epidemic has shown that people with “new” or “scary” infections continue to be stigmatized, even by health care workers.
- Many nurses had not been using long-standing personal protective equipment (PPE) donning and doffing protocols in everyday practice—there was a scramble to reemphasize these protocols after the first case of Ebola arrived in the U.S.
- Years of “bottom line” management in U.S. hospitals have left many facilities with inadequate staff, fewer education and training resources, and multiple systems issues that have impeded disaster preparedness and compromised the quality of protective gear and other supplies available to staff.
- Content-hungry print and electronic media interfere with evidence-based responses to infectious disease threats when they pander to fear and hysteria. The damage during this epidemic ranged from unnecessary quarantine of asymptomatic individuals to willful denials of actual transmission risk in the U.S. to euthanizing the dog of a Spanish nurse after she contracted Ebola.
Nurses are inevitably on the front lines of any health care crisis. Will we learn from mistakes made during this epidemic to better prepare for the next one?