The reassuring news in the Texas Ebola cases

WASHINGTON POST

By Todd C. Frankel                         October 14

....The Dallas nurse, 26-year old Nina Pham,who helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was the first person diagnosed with the dreaded disease in the United States became the first – and so far only – person infected by Duncan. In the wake of her infection, U.S. health officials have pledged to review how future Ebola cases are handled.

But the case is also noteworthy for another, potentially positive reason: Nearly 50 people were exposed to Ebola before the nurse, and none of them has been diagnosed with the disease.

This group of neighbors, family members and first responders are being watched carefully by health authorities. They had some degree of close contact with Duncan during the four-day period when he was contagious – from when he started showing Ebola symptoms on Sept. 24 to when the hospital finally admitted him on Sept. 28. They didn’t take any Ebola-specific precautions. They didn’t know he was infected.... Yet, so far, they have not gotten sick. And their 21-day Ebola incubation period started before Pham’s.

Protect Environmental workers move disposal barrels to a staging area outside the apartment of a healthcare worker who treated Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan and tested positive for the disease, Monday, Oct. 13, 2014, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Brandon Wade)

“That the casually exposed are not getting sick, it’s reassuring,” said Dr. Julie Fischer, an associate research professor of health policy at George Washington University. “What we’ve seen so far, it’s not surprising and it’s not shocking.”

That’s a good thing. This entire harrowing episode is playing out as health authorities predicted. Ebola is acting as portrayed in medical textbooks, based on nearly 40 years of research. Experts said the disease is hard to catch, that an infected person is not contagious until symptoms appear and that Ebola is spread by close contact with bodily fluids such as blood, sweat and saliva.

...the fear behind Ebola is massive. But the virus does not appear to be any more virulent than in previous outbreaks, experts say. Doomsday predictions of Ebola mutating and becoming airborne like the flu have not played out.

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