Trump officials to send Ebola-exposed Americans to Kenya rather than bring them home: NYT

[dalton99a]

15. Kick

Ebola has a death rate of about 50 percent, but early access to high-quality care and treatments can dramatically improve the odds of survival.

The United States has multiple facilities with state-of-the-art resources for monitoring and treating people with dangerous diseases, including Ebola. These include a unit in Omaha where 18 Americans are under observation for hantavirus following an outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship this month.

While the facility in Kenya may be better than those in Congo, it is unlikely to match the sophistication of those established in the United States for Ebola and other dangerous pathogens, according to Dr. Craig Spencer, a public health expert at Brown University.

“I find it hard to believe that they’re going to be able to stand up in the span of a couple days or even months a similar system that has been created over the past decade to do exactly this,” Dr. Spencer said.

Dr. Spencer is an emergency medicine physician who contracted Ebola in 2014 after treating patients in Guinea. He was in the intensive care unit at Bellevue Hospital in New York City for 19 days. Leaving Americans in Africa rather than bringing them home is “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own,” Dr. Spencer said.