Kaci Hickox reports in the Dailas News that a nurse who has been treating Ebola patients for Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone is complaining that she is being held in mandatory quarantine even though she negative for Ebola, in the article entitled,
UTA grad isolated at New Jersey hospital as part of Ebola quarantine. She provides a first person account of the treatment she received from U.S. border patrol authorities on her return from Western Africa.
(Editor’s note: Kaci Hickox, a nurse with degrees from the University of Texas at Arlington and the Johns Hopkins University, has been caring for Ebola patients while on assignment with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone. Upon her return to the U.S. on Friday, she was placed in quarantine at a New Jersey hospital. She has tested negative in a preliminary test for Ebola, but the hospital says she will remain under mandatory quarantine for 21 days and will be monitored by public health officials. Dr. Seema Yasmin, a Dallas Morning News staff writer, worked with Hickox as a disease detective with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With Yasmin’s help, Hickox wrote this first-person piece exclusively for the News.)
Here are just a few snippets of her tale of woe which is worth quick read in its entirety.
I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine. ...
After many hours at the airport and her normal temperature, she became flushed so a skin monitor indicated she had a fever, even though she apparently did not, so she was escorted to University Hospital in Newark by eight police cars. Where doctors took her temperature and found it to be normal. Her Ebola blood test came back negative. She will remain in quarantine for 21 days, nevertheless.
I sat alone in the isolation tent and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?
I recalled my last night at the Ebola management center in Sierra Leone. I was called in at midnight because a 10-year-old girl was having seizures. I coaxed crushed tablets of Tylenol and an anti-seizure medicine into her mouth as her body jolted in the bed.
It was the hardest night of my life. I watched a young girl die in a tent, away from her family. ...
The epidemic continues to ravage West Africa. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that as many as 15,000 people have died from Ebola. We need more health care workers to help fight the epidemic in West Africa. The U.S. must treat returning health care workers with dignity and humanity.
We are lucky to have such courageous medical professionals wiling to risk their lives to care for the infected and try to contain this epidemic in Western African. Certainly, we can do better than this in how we treat returning heroes.
In Experts: Quarantines may dissuade Ebola volunteers, Yamiche Alcindor, of USA TODAY, reports that experts are raising concerns the that latest round of much stricter quarantine policies may "discourage health workers from volunteering in the impacted West African countries, thereby making the outbreak harder to contain." Also, members of the general public may be incentivized to hide or downplay symptoms, undermining the effectiveness of our containment strategy.
New York, New Jersey and Illinois announced mandatory 21-day quarantines for those arriving back in the United States after having direct contact with Ebola-infected individuals in West Africa. The outbreak — the largest in history — has left more than 10,000 people infected and nearly 5,000 dead, the World Health Organization announced Saturday.
"It may be politically the obvious thing to do but it may well be counterproductive," said Stephen Morse, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University. "If people are forced to quarantine for three weeks that means most of them will not be able to do any sort of work and that means essentially lost income." ...
"We need to rethink this with science and reason," said Robert Glatter, an emergency medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital, located in New York City's Upper East Side. "It's going to discourage health care workers from going out to the source, which is where we need to be."
We need to think very carefully about these quarantine policies and the potential unintended side-effects or discouraging help workers from aid Ebola cases, and also the potential for discouraging respondents from honestly reporting their symptoms.
Also, whatever we end up doing with regard to border questionnaires, quarantines, testing, etc. we should do so in respectful and compassionate ways with more attention to the easy things such as food, water, basic physical comfort, communication with relatives, and honest timely information about what is happening.
Perhaps, we need to have a patients advocate or ombudsperson present until we can work the kinks out of our systems, policies, and get our people trained and up to speed on our changing policies and protocols.
As always our hearts go out to all afflicted with Ebola and other infectious diseases, and their families and loved ones. Also, our special thanks and appreciation to all of the courageous health workers and others who heroically step up to care for the ill with compassion, even at great risk to themselves.
Here we see examples where even small, easy to offer gestures of compassion, and thoughtfulness for our fellow citizens can make such an enormous difference to their experiences as we all endeavor to adapt and learn how best to respond to this global health challenge. Many others are bigger. Many more people die of Lassa fever, malaria, and dozens of other infectious diseases, however, Ebola has captured out attention now, so reflecting on how we can improve our response is an opportunity and challenge worthy of our attention.
5:53 PM PT: OMG, Darryl Issa says we are all going to die of "Eboli" (sic) from "Guyana" (sic). Last night Rachel Maddow skewered Issa for not being able to get the name of the disease or country right even after about a half dozen tries of stirring up panic.