Costs of not controlling Ebola

Photo: Contributed

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) employees wearing protective gear receives an ambulance carrying suspected victims of the Ebola virus at MSF's Ebola isolation and treatment center in Monrovia, Liberia, Monday Sept. 29, 2014.

The revelation that a man with Ebola was diagnosed in a Texas hospital could be seen as the first case of the dreaded disease discovered in North America.

Or you could see it as a spark, flying far from a raging conflagration.

Disease experts in North America insist that the health systems in the United States and Canada are sufficiently different — more advanced, blessed with steady supplies of clean needles, protective equipment and clean water — that the case in Dallas is not likely to trigger a large outbreak.

But they also warn that as long as West Africa is engulfed in the worst Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen, such sparks will continue to fly.

Will they land in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya? Mumbai, India? The banlieues of Paris? It's anyone's guess, but that they will continue to scatter seems inevitable, experts say.

And that means the world's only choice is to urgently mount the response needed to slow and eventually stop the spread of a virus that may be killing as many as 70 per cent of people being infected, they insist.

"The best way to sum it up in my mind is a good offence in West Africa is the best defence for everyone else. And that's ultimately what has to happen," said Dr. Kamran Khan, a Toronto-based expert who uses global flight data to predict spread of infectious diseases.

The international president of Medecins Sans Frontieres, which has taken the medical lead on this and all recent Ebola outbreaks, puts it more bluntly.

"If you don't want this to spread further, you need to increase the means locally to treat and contain the epidemic," Dr. Joanne Liu said.

"The best way to contain the epidemic of Ebola is by increasing the response locally. It's not by barricading ourselves in our home countries and cutting the air flights."

Reached on a plane about to depart Montreal for Geneva on Tuesday night, Liu said the Dallas case will show North Americans a little bit of what all the fuss has been about.

Local and state health authorities, aided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, will spend days figuring out the man's every move from the time he entered the United States (on Sept. 20) to the time he transferred to an isolation room at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (Sept. 29).

Even if a case should come to Canada, health officials think it would be contained. The precautions hospitals in the developed world take to prevent spread of diseases within their walls should be enough to keep Ebola in check, said Dr. Allison McGeer.

The head of infection control for Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, she pointed to things like the spacing of patient beds, the regular cleaning of rooms, hand-washing rules, personal protective equipment and needles designed for safe use and disposal.

As well, hospitals and health systems have been planning for Ebola — and the Texas case will inspire them to spend even more time on preparedness.

"There's no important message about risk to North Americans from this (case in Dallas) but there's a very important message about risk to people in West Africa and we really need urgently, all of us, to be ramping up the response to that outbreak," McGeer said.