SPH Researchers Featured in ‘BU Today’ Special Report on Ebola.

SPH researchers with experience in fighting infectious diseases said the current Ebola outbreak spreading through western Africa presents unique and daunting challenges to health workers trying to stop the advance of the deadly disease

Davidson Hamer, a professor of global health, assessed the current actions being taken to contain the disease, as well as the precautions needed to prevent health workers from becoming unwitting couriers of Ebola.

In the countries where Ebola has emerged, public information campaigns have been launched to counter rampant and deeply-held misinformation about the disease and how it spreads. Hamer attributes part of that public unawareness to the fact that this region of Africa has never had a large Ebola outbreak.

“There are misperceptions and fears about seeking treatment,” Hamer said. “That’s causing [infected people] to leave towns and infect relatives. My speculation is people fear that if they go to a health center, they’re going to get sick there. It’s not a complete misperception, but it makes it hard to contain the disease when people are running the other way.”

While the threat of Ebola spreading to the U.S. is still relatively small, other parts of Africa still do not have the levels of infection control that would contain it once identified.

“Nigeria is one of the most densely and heavily populated countries on the subcontinent. If it spreads there, we could have a very large-scale epidemic,” Hamer told BU Today.

In a chilling postscript to his comments, late Wednesday Nigerian health officials declared a national emergency when five health care workers in Lagos — a city of 21 million people — contracted the disease after coming into contact with a man who had recently flown into Nigeria from Liberia, where the disease continues to spread. Nigerian authorities reported on Thursday that the infected man was in contact with at least 70 people on his flight from Liberia to Lagos, where he immediately collapsed after landing.

Laura Forsberg White, an associate professor of biostatistics, told BU Today that a critical part of stemming the spread of Ebola will be the logistical and administrative groundwork of identifying and isolating infected individuals in cities and towns, where close contact is more likely and tougher to prevent.

Ebola in a rural setting often follows the predictions of basic epidemiological models of transmission, but White said, “public health intervention can decrease the amount of contact people have with each other and improve people’s immunity through vaccines or drugs. On the other hand, having people travel and take the illness with them to other areas can prolong it.

“The current Ebola outbreak is much more complex than these basic models. It is spreading through a very fluid population where there is a lot of travel,” she warned, but added that the chances of Ebola spreading outside of Africa are very small.