[grania]

I'm not really worried, but wonder about the logic of what's being done to contain Ebola. The caregivers seem to be giving the all-clear to people very quickly when they no longer test for the virus. But I wonder. Something changed that made Ebola go pandemic. Is it possible it can lurk in a person's system, not detected by testing, unless something triggers it to spread out of control?

If anyone ends up getting Ebola back after they tested to have been cleared from it, that's when I'd get real cautious. I get the feeling they don't know what they're doing, and it's all about "reassuring the public" and not affecting holiday travel.

JMHO

[Sooth2222]

"I get the feeling they don't know what they're doing"

That's not just a feeling. It's reality. They are all just winging it.

(If anyone shouldn't be contracting Ebola if there weren't huge unknowns, it's doctors and nurses, who are trained in infectious disease control.)

[Morpheus2009]

I personally wouldn’t want to take a blood transfusion from a person who had been to the ebola hot zone. I would be scared that even if they were asymptomatic, their blood would infect me. I wouldn’t also want to have sex with someone who was recently in an ebola hot zone either, until I was sure that either the virus was out of her system, or that she wasn’t infected at all.

As for travel, given how confusing early ebola symptoms are with norovirus or flu symptoms, I think a whole lot of people aren’t going to want to travel by air for the season.

[JimSEA]

The patient in this case seems a good, compassionate man but the protocal for a physician returing from treating Ebola patients would seem to be lackadaisical at best. You know the guy has been exposed multiple times. He should have been isolated for 21 days after his last exposure. Common sense loses to PC once again.

[PA Engineer]

If anyone ends up getting Ebola back after they tested to have been cleared from it, that's when I'd get real cautious.

There actually is some troubling information coming out now:

This is from the PFIF and is a post from a webcast answer on Medline.

Reinfection, Reemergence Unknown

Larry Hand October 23, 2014

In response to a question from a webcast participant, experts discussed the possibilities of reinfection and reemergence of disease after initial clearance.

"We know that patients who have survived do have specific antibodies in their blood," said Armand Sprecher, MD, from Médecins Sans Frontières. "Of course, what we don't know is the threshold at which antibodies give you a surrogate marker of protection. It's possible we may gather that over the course of this epidemic, as we hopefully move toward vaccination."

Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, from Partners in Health, Boston, Massachusetts, added, "In Monrovia, a couple of children under 5 who had negative [polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) after treatment] then returned some weeks later with positive PCR.

"These are children who had a normal course of illness...and had a clinical recovery, and both of these children became ill in a day or two," Dr Sprecher continued. "They came back and were found to be febrile and [PCR-]positive again. Both children had some neurologic signs. The feeling amongst the virologists is...the virus gets into some parts of the body with immunologic protection, like the central nervous system. The immune response clears the virus from the periphery, the patient has a clinical recovery, while the viral infection progresses in the [central nervous system] and eventually returns and reemerges as a renewed positivity. At least one of the children became negative again."

[Morpheus2009]

It sounds to me that it could be transmitted by blood, even if the infectee was asymptomatic. We should ban those who were in the hit zone from donating blood, at least unless we are sure that there is no Ebola in their blood.