Ebola: Local health workers in preparedness mode

In the aftermath of having the first person die of Ebola on American soil in Dallas, local health officials are quick to downplay fears of the disease having an outbreak in the United States, and yet are preparing for all possibilities.

Joe Russell, public health officer for the Flathead City-County Health Department, said his office would be meeting with officials from Kalispell Regional Healthcare and North Valley Hospital in the next week to devise a containment plan should someone with the  hemorrhagic fever make it to the Flathead.

“We’re developing response frameworks all the time,” he said. “We were actually on a conference call with the [Centers for Disease Control] this morning,” he said on Thursday. “They are taking it very seriously.”

Ebola, a filovirus from sub-Saharan Africa, causes fever, vomiting, diarrhea and has a very high mortality rate — anywhere between 20 and 90 percent, depending on the strain. There are no known vaccinations for the disease, which has killed thousands in West African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The CDC projects more than a million cases of Ebola worldwide by January 2015, but American doctors, with the help of the national disease-control resources, should be able to control any outbreak in the United States.

“Our hospital in Kalispell could easily handle an Ebola case,” Russell said. “They have the negative pressure rooms and the equipment to handle the disease. The only thing we would need is training. If a case were to come here, we would get help from the CDC or from the state.”

Jim Oliverson, vice president at Kalispell Regional Healthcare, said the new surgery wing alone has six negative pressure rooms, designed to suck air inward to avoid any sort of germ or virus leaving the room. Another half-dozen such rooms are located elsewhere in the hospital, and the new emergency room plans call for five more.

Kalispell Regional also has a world-class infectious-disease doctor and an infectious-disease nurse, both well trained to handle contagious diseases and limit exposure, Oliverson said.

North Valley Hospital also has four rooms equipped as isolation rooms, and Catherine Todd, senior director of business development and community relations, said the staff at the Whitefish hospital was just as ready in the case of one of these virulent diseases.

“All medical staff are trained on infection control and follow written standard operating procedures,” she wrote in an email. “NVH has completed and is compliant with the check list provided by the CDC as it relates to Ebola. Our medical staff are currently screening patients for febrile illness and recent travel to areas of potential risk.”

Only about 150 people every day come to the United States from the three above-mentioned West African countries, and the vast majority of those stop at five American airports (JFK in New York; Dulles in Washington, D.C.; O’Hare in Chicago; Newark in New Jersey; and Atlanta) which instituted screening protocols Wednesday in the wake of Thomas Eric Duncan’s death in Dallas.

Russell said it is extremely unlikely a traveler from the danger areas would first touch down in the United States in Kalispell, but as the incubation period for Ebola is between two and 21 days, he said the possibility — however slim — exists the disease could make it to Montana.

“We’re planning around this,” Russell said. “We’re not hyping this up; we just want to be ready. It’s good that we are being proactive about this. We are receiving information all the time and make plans for just about everything.”

Oliverson wanted to make it clear no one in the medical community was panicking like pundits on cable news programs. The doctors and nurses plan drills around infectious diseases, and Ebola is no exception.

Ebola patients are only contagious when they show symptoms, and even then, the disease can only be caught by transmission of bodily fluids — blood, saliva, vomit, urine, stool, etc.

While the disease makes for easy sensationalism and portents of doom, officials want to make clear that for Americans, flu season is a bigger threat right now.

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.