Michele Barry, MD, director of Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global Health, has launched a fundraising campaign to help combat the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, which has claimed the life of a colleague who mentored residents in the Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Scholars Program.
Samuel Brisbane, MD, was the first Liberian doctor to die in the outbreak, which the World Health Organization says is responsible for more than 700 deaths in West Africa and is by far the largest outbreak in the history of the disease. Brisbane was an internist who treated patients at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in the capital city of Monrovia, the country's largest hospital. A second medical officer has become ill at the hospital, one of the sites for the scholars' program, Barry told me.
Through the program, Brisbane mentored physicians from Stanford and other institutions who volunteer for six-week stints in resource-limited countries. He quarantined himself after showing signs of illness but died on July 26 after being transferred to a treatment center, Barry said.
Like HIV, the Ebola virus is spread through direct contact with blood or body fluids from an infected individual. Barry said Liberia is in desperate need of personal protective equipment for health care workers, such as masks, gowns and gloves, as well as trained personnel who can do contact tracing and isolation of infected individuals. The Ebola virus has a 21-day incubation period, during which time an infected individual can transmit the virus.
Barry joined an informal fundraising campaign with her colleagues on Tuesday to help Liberian health-care workers contain the spread of the disease, raising $11,000 in 48 hours. Today, she broadened the appeal in an e-mail sent to all Stanford medical school faculty.
Barry has had experience fighting Ebola in Uganda, where she said outbreaks have been limited by isolating patients in outdoor, tented hospitals and where physicians and nurses have had access to good protective gear. In the past, she said the disease typically has had "hot spots" that last a month and then subside.
But the latest epidemic, which has affected patients in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as Liberia, has followed a somewhat different path.
"I think we are doing a better job of taking care of patients and keeping them alive longer, so they become more viremic -- meaning the virus has spread through their bloodstream -- and more infectious," she said. "And with globalization, there is more traffic across borders so spillover to other countries occurs."
She said she does not see the disease as a major threat to the United States, where effective infection control methods are widespread.
"I think we need to be vigilant, but I don't think there needs to be any true concern that this is going to spread to the United States," she said. "There's always a risk of a patient coming in unknown to the hospital, but we practice good universal precautions because we have the equipment and we've been trained to treat HIV."
Donations to the health-care project can be made online here.
Photo, from 2000 outbreak in Uganda, by ASSOCIATED PRESS
