Ebola Action Items

What can be done? This post will make some suggestions.

1. The first priority is to reduce the rate of transmission through known channels, which I discussed in detail in my previous post, The Ebola Chain Reaction.

Home Caregivers. Education is the first need: people need to know Ebola’s symptoms, then they need to know what to do if someone in their household starts to display them. This is an extremely hard problem. The early symptoms of Ebola — fever, vomiting and diarrhea — are indistinguishable from many other endemic diseases. Every person with a fever can’t be taken immediately to the hospital, and in the meantime the home caregiver is in no position to use any semblance of anti-infection protocol. In a crowded household people share the same spaces for eating, sleeping and every other aspect of life. Practical advice for home caregivers needs to be developed and communicated. That advice should include how a patient can be cared for in the home with reduced risk, when a patient should be taken to a clinic or hospital and how to decontaminate living spaces after a patient has left. But I don’t see how the risk of transmission to other members of a household can be much reduced, especially in poor, crowded housholds.

Healthcare Providers. Sooner or later — hopefully sooner — a symptomatic patient will be brought to a clinic or hospital. Again and again patients have infected multiple hospital staff members, and even forced the hospital to close for decontamination. As the numbers of patients increase this cannot be allowed to continue. Emergency rooms must be organized and staffed so that an Ebola patient can be identified and isolated without endangering staff or other patients. That’s easy to say but really hard to make true. Can we expect emergency room staff to wear bio-hazard suits? Can each patient be kept apart from other patients until they have been assessed? And again the problem arises of distinguishing early stage Ebola from other diseases. A quick, cheap and accurate test is needed to enable healthcare providers to distinguish who does or doesn’t present an Ebola risk. Airports are starting to use infrared detectors to cull out people who are running fevers, but it’s hard to imagine similar gear being deployed to all the relevant hospitals and clinics, and even if someone has a fever a hospital — unlike an airport — can’t just turn the patient away; but knowing who does and doesn’t have a fever might be helpful. And of course healthcare providers need the training and gear necessary to safely care for Ebola patients.

Traditional Funeral Practices. African funeral practices spread infection widely and must be suspended. This is a very difficult problem, since funerals are one of the ways people deal with the powerful emotion of grief. They will resist changes, and unless physically prevented are likely to model the behaviors they have seen and performed in the past. Culturally-specific strategies must be devised and implemented to encourage people to mourn Ebola victims in ways that do not place them at risk of infection.

These three transmission modes are quite capable of keeping the epidemic growing, with an Effective Reproduction Rate (Re) of more than one (as discussed in my last post). Pushing each of them down as low as possible is the first priority.

2. New modes of transmission are possible in the urban environment. Prior outbreaks have all been in rural areas, so there is no past experience with the additional ways Ebola can spread in a city, especially in crowded areas.

The first question is how important any new urban modes of transmission are, i.e. how much of a contribution they make to Re. If any urban mode of transmission is comparable to the known modes it needs to get similar priority, but if urban modes of transmission are more theoretical than real they can be deprioritized. The contact tracing process generates a tremendous amount of information about exactly what kinds of contacts did and did not lead to infection. Contact tracing information from all countries should be collected and analyzed, and conclusions should be shared amongst Ebola fighters. Communications to the public should generally be accurate, but in the public interest may not always be “the whole truth.” Significant modes of urban transmission that are so identified must be countered, if possible.

Even before data is available it makes sense to analyze urban life and make changes that seem logical and have the potential of being cost-effective.

• Replacing shaking hands with fist bumps is a step in the right direction, although elbow bumps or just bows would be even better. Air kisses between friends and colleagues (if that was ever an African thing) can be suspended for the duration.
• Situations where people are crowded into direct contact are part of urban life, but present an obvious risk. People can be cautioned to avoid crowds and steps can be taken to reduce crowding in taxis and buses. Update 9/8/14: This chilling item from the Wall Street Journal suggests that taxi drivers and surfaces in taxis could easily become contaminated by bleeding, etc. Ebola patients. [WSJ 9/7/14]
• While 60% alcohol hand sanitizer is better than nothing the CDC recommendation is to wash hands with soap and water whenever possible. Sanitizer could have an adverse effect if people use it instead of washing. There is also a question of whether alcohol has much effect on the virus anyway. Update 10/7/14: Since Ebola has a lipid coat alcohol-based hand sanitizer should be effective against it. The CDC continues to recommend alcohol-based hand sanitizer (with at least 60% alcohol) when hand washing isn’t possible. [CDC 10/7/14] Bleach is standard for disinfection, but it’s not clear to me whether dipping ones hands in a shared bleach bucket, as is becoming common in some affected cities, is a net benefit.
• Some offices are taking people’s temperatures when they enter, and asking them to wear it as a badge. The risk of transmission in an office setting would seem to be very low in any case, but if this serves to raise awareness and control anxiety it may be worthwhile.
• Closing schools initially seems logical, but it imposes social costs and might turn out to be an overreaction. School children are somewhere doing something, probably with other children, when they aren’t in school. It might actually be better to open school, with provisions to minimize physical contact, and perhaps also with a process for taking each student’s temperature as they arrive and sending home anyone with a fever.
• Other situations in which people put their hands on one another deserve consideration. Massage parlors and sexual contact come to mind. And a panicky post worries about barber shops (not without reason).

Amongst all these possible risks and countermeasures, public communications should focus on the most important transmission modes and the most important countermeasures, based on the best available information at each point. On the other hand, worthless countermeasures, or countermeasures against trivial risks, may be ignored if they afford comfort and don’t unduly draw attention or resources away from more important issues, or lead to a dangerously false sense of security.

3. Superstition, rumors and mistrust must be countered and overcome. The West African Ebola fight has been plagued by these factors from the outset. In addition to the usual superstitions about causes and folk remedies the rumor spread that Ebola was brought by the healthcare personnel who were in fact trying to stop it. MSF had to withdraw from more than two dozen “red villages” because this hostility made them too dangerous. The poor and crowded West Point district of Monrovia attacked and ransacked a quarantine facility that had been sited there. In part this reflected “Ebola denial” which will disappear on its own as the epidemic makes itself felt more widely. But it also reflected mistrust and irrational fear that must be countered.

4. A pattern of quarantine breaking and lying must be broken. Again and again, especially among the privileged classes in Nigeria, people have broken quarantine and/or lied about prior contacts with Ebola cases, thereby putting dozens or hundreds of health care providers and other contacts at risk. (For details see my post, Arrogance and Privilege Imperil Nigeria’s Attempt to Contain Ebola) This reflects arrogance and a habit of getting their own way regardless of consequences to others. The immorality of this behavior — and its dire consequences — must be brought home to everyone, at every level of society. This is culturally-specific but one imagines that achieving this goal might involve use of media and involvement of religious and other thought leaders. It is hard to see how Nigeria — or indeed any society, including developed countries — can control Ebola if a pattern of quarantine breaking and lying like the one we have seen so far should persist.

5. Adequate healthcare facilities are essential to allow Ebola patients to be cared for outside the home, where they are much more likely to pass the virus along to others. The epidemic has consistently outstripped available facilities, and unless there is a marvelous international intervention this seems doomed to continue. Healthcare is also key to minimizing the death rate, which is important as a humanitarian matter even though it is only tangentially relevant to stopping the epidemic. Sadly, there is no possibility of replicating the level of care the two Americans received at Emory, which no doubt contributed to their recoveries. But any lessons learned in developed hospitals about how best to manage Ebola patients should be made available to African healthcare providers. Most important are any recommendations that it might be possible to implement in an overstressed and impoverished facility.

Updated 10/7/14: Here is a new idea that might make an important contribution, even though it’s really distasteful. Sierra Leone plans to build up to 1,000 “makeshift Ebola clinics” that would offer little, if any, treatment. [AP 10/2/14] These “clinics” would really be hospices which would let people die and be safely cremated or buried without infecting their families. It’s dreadful to think of abandoning people who could be saved with minimal care. But just at the moment this may be the least bad alternative, since if the patients die at home they will very likely infect their caretakers and some or all of the other members of their households. If enough of these facilities could be provided, and if people could be persuaded to use them, this could be a game changer.

6. Outsiders must send money, health care and infection control materials, healthcare workers and healthcare trainers. Happily — if far too late — the world finally seems to be waking up to the gravity of the situation, and to its own moral obligation to help, as well as its self-interest in stopping the epidemic before it affects even more countries. Individual readers can find a list of ways to help at the current Ebola Report post. Charity Navigator can help you assess the quality of charities that are fighting the epidemic. Doctors Without Borders USA, for example (the U.S. branch of Médecins Sans Frontières) gets the highest ratings for both use of funds and accountability/transparency.

7. Immunity is the ultimate weapon against disease, and in this case it may be the only way the epidemic can be stopped. Obviously, testing of a vaccine must be given top priority. People who have recovered from Ebola are also an important resource. It might be possible to recruit recovered Ebola patients to play roles in healthcare settings, such as hospital emergency rooms, or in other situations where their immunity could come in handy. Recovered patients may also offer a source of antibodies that could be purified as a serum to help current victims. Mutation is the ultimate weapon of disease, and this could undercut both a vaccine and survivor immunity, but as to this possibility we just have to hope for the best.