16 Members of Doctors Without Borders Infected, Nine Dead

[Dani]

Sad, and very worrisome: 16 Members of Doctors Without Borders Infected, Nine Dead I don't believe that MSF ever lost a worker to disease before this epidemic.

Then there are the hard choices that staff may be forced to make:

A pediatrician, Switala said her team made the difficult decision not to resuscitate babies who were not newborn out of fear that staff may be infected by bodily fluids. The clinic in the town of Bo in Sierra Leone similarly decided to turn away pregnant women because childbirth poses a greater risk to staff.​

I don't think that staff in Europe and North America will be exempt from making choices similar to that, if not quite so heartbreaking. But we're going to have to learn to do less, instead of more, and that goes completely against the grain.

 

[Emily]

Re: 16 Members of Doctors Without Borders Infected, Nine Dead

It is extremely sad but with this many staff getting sick - could it be time to stand back and examine infection control?

The original 1976 Zaire strain outbreak:

The Zaire epidemic had all the attributes of a
common source outbreak, together with a fortunately
low rate of Secondary person-to-person transmission.
The means by which the virus was introduced
into Yambuku Mission Hospital will probably never
be precisely known, but it seems possible that it was
brought directly from the Sudan by man. Dissemination
of the agent into the villages of the region was
principally through contaminated equipment used
for parenteral injections. The epidemic waned when
the hospital was closed for want of medical staff.