Canadian Ebola team pulled from Sierra Leone

Canada’s public health agency is going to bring home three scientists who were helping fight the Ebola outbreak in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. The three were part of a mobile team from the renown National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in the western city of Winnipeg. The lab developed an experimental vaccine against Ebola and has contribute 1,000 doses to the World Health Organization.

The facility has sent its mobile lab to other African locations to help deal with previous Ebola outbreaks. NML was created after the SARS respiratory illness came to Toronto in 2003.

Voluntary isolation

The scientists are being recalled after three guests at their hotel tested positive for the Ebola virus and after the World Health Organization pulled its staff out 0f Kailahun because a epidemiologist was infected. None of the Canadians have any symptoms but they will be in voluntary isolation and will be monitored as they travel back to Canada.

The WHO will investigate how it epidemiologist was infected even though he had no contact with patients. Of the health care workers who do help patients, 250 have caught the illness and 120 have died.

Is protective equipment safe?

Some U.S. doctors are questioning the safety of protective equipment designed to protect health care workers from being infected. The equipment used by WHO is different from that used by Medicins Sans Frontieres/DoctorsWithout Borders. MSF has worked on Ebola outbreaks for years but none of its staffers has died of the disease.

Questions are being raised about the equipment itself, as well as the procedures for donning and doffing it, which may be contributing to infections.

Ebola is scary, but…

Fear of Ebola is great because so many who catch it die and they die a horrible death. But authorities remind the public the disease is only transmitted by contact with bodily fluids of people who already have symptoms. In contrast, ordinary influenza or colds can be transmitted through droplets in the air.