Spotting Ebola in the Crowd
Original article from BU Today by Kat J. McAlpine January 28, 2019
At a clinic in Liberia, people trickle in from the surrounding neighborhoods, shivering despite the warm air, reporting varying degrees of headaches and nausea. Many of them are anxious—it’s 2014, an Ebola outbreak is underway, and they fear the worst: that they, like some of their neighbors and loved ones, have contracted the highly fatal disease. One by one, they wait to be examined by a clinician, all the while mosquitoes float and buzz in the thick evening air.
During the early stages of Ebola, symptoms are often hard to distinguish from another disease endemic to the region, malaria, a mosquito-borne blood infection caused by a parasite. Without an instantaneous way of screening a patient’s blood, people sick with malaria, instead of being treated with antimalarial medication, could be placed into quarantine and surrounded by other ill people who ultimately might, in fact, have Ebola and be highly contagious.
That danger of being unable to diagnose Ebola—or malaria—in seconds or minutes, rather than hours or days, is one of the major deficiencies that contributed to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola crisis, according to the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
“The standard diagnostic tests that exist are very good, but they’re hard to do out in the field in the middle of an outbreak like we saw in West Africa,” says John Connor, a School of Medicine associate professor of microbiology.