Can You get Ebola???

I forget which killer-Ebola-Virus movie it was. I do remember Rene Russo was in it. You don’t forget Rene Russo. I can recall a few hazy plot details: A monkey escaped, someone coughed in a crowded movie theater, and then the whole town’s organs were melting out of their every orifice. Yep, that orifice, too.

Fortunately, “that’s exaggerated for Hollywood,” says Dr. Chris Basler, a researcher specializing in Ebola at New York City’s Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine. “There’s no evidence that the virus, unlike, say, influenza, can be transmitted by breathing or coughing or sneezing. It’s transmitted strictly via close contact with infectious bodily fluids—blood, urine, semen—similar to the HIV virus.

“And though yes, a significant percentage of people who contract Ebola do have signs of hemorrhage—one thing that happens is that your blood vessels begin to leak fluid from your circulatory system into your tissue, and that’s bad—the phenomenon of bleeding is really a secondary effect. Not everyone who gets the disease has significant bleeding symptoms. So it’s not the overwhelming bleeding that really kills you.”

Dr. Basler has been studying Ebola for 15 years, and he does not downplay the disease’s staggering lethality, evidenced by the 660 Africans already killed since the outbreak was discovered last February.

“It’s fair to say that it is one of the most deadly pathogens that we know of,” he says. “It’s a horrible disease.”

But, he adds, that the “we’re-all-doomed!” scenario that scares the bejesus out of clowns like Donald Trump is, in fact, just that: a fictional scenario. “Ebola isn’t so easily transmitted from person to person,” he says. “And to have something similar happen in the United States to what is happening in West Africa is extremely unlikely.”

I felt it prudent to ring up Dr. Basler given the unprecedented spread of the viral disease throughout West Africa and the heightened news coverage of the American doctor and nurse who contacted Ebola in Liberia and have been flown back to the States for treatment. I have been tracking the spread of Ebola from Central Africa to West Africa for some time, not least because earlier this spring, my 17-year-old son asked me if he could spend part of his summer working for a charity that digs wells in remote Ghanian villages.

His mother and I have allowed him to roam pretty far afield by himself in his young life. But this time, aware that Ebola had broken from remote villages in the interior to coastal population centers from Guinea to Sierra Leone to Liberia—too close to Ghana for my taste—we had to decline his request.

And again in contrast to my Hollywood recollections, Dr. Basler says that while scientists are still not 100 percent certain, it looks as though the Ebola virus jumped from the animal kingdom into the human population via certain species of bats, and not simians. (Although it’s possible that Ebola has also jumped from bats to monkeys.)

Two of the first cases ever recorded involved a Dutch tourist and an American tourist who some 30 years ago explored a Ugandan cave carpeted with bat urine and guano. The Dutchwoman died; the American, after returning to the States for treatment, survived.

The irrepressible comic stylings of people like Trump notwithstanding, “an Ebola patient in the United States is much less likely to transmit the disease,” Dr. Basler says. “They’ll become sick, go to a hospital, and because of the severe infection the hospital will take the standard precautions to prevent the spread of the infection from one individual to another. It’ll be similar to the precautions one takes to prevent the transmission of HIV.”

Dr. Basler’s colleague Dr. Kevin Chason, who is responsible for Mount Sinai Hospital’s EMS program and is co-director of its disaster response program, agrees. He says that along with Mount Sinai, hospitals and health centers across the country have long been briefed by the Center for Disease Controls and the State Department about the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We are, Dr. Chason adds, more than prepared in the unlikely event the disease jumps the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s important to understand that this disease in endemic to certain areas of the world and that people who travel here from those areas will be recognized, evaluated, and in some cases isolated if they do arrive here,” he says. “The United States has infection-control measures in place that are not routinely available in, say, West Africa, that would easily contain any spread of this virus.”

Some of the measures he mentions include routine hand hygiene, protective gloves, gowns, masks, eye protection, single rooms for isolation, and special ventilation systems, all more readily available in modern American hospitals.

“As an emergency physician, we like to think that we can handle whatever comes through that door,” Dr. Chason says. “But in the main, let’s hope it doesn’t.”

My career has taken me to plenty of shitholes around the world, including the worst quarters of N’Djamena and Newark. But I’ve always thought of Liberia’s Monrovia and Haiti’s Port au Prince—particularly the Cite Soleil section, where the only stream serves as both drinking water and toilet—as tied for the most desperately unlucky. Until now. For I suppose given its current Ebola outbreak, Monrovia takes that title.

Alas, I have to hope it retains it.