King County’s top doctor offers Ebola assurance following emergency declaration

Worries about Africa’s Ebola outbreak grew Friday as the World Health Organization declared the epidemic an international public health emergency.

But King County’s top public health doctor reiterated Friday while local officials are monitoring the situation closely, the risk in the U.S. and King County remains extremely low.

Even if a patient with Ebola managed to travel to the United States, local health officials and facilities are more than prepared, says Dr. Jeff Duchin, Chief of Communicable Disease and Epidemiology for Public Health – Seattle & King County, and the public health committee chair for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

“Our hospitals routinely treat patients who require the types of infection control precautions that are recommended for Ebola infections. They can safely manage a patient with Ebola infections using these routine precautions.”

The current outbreak is the largest and longest outbreak ever recorded of Ebola, which has a death rate of about 50 percent and has so far killed at least 932 people. WHO declared similar emergencies for the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and for polio in May.

The WHO chief, Dr. Margaret Chan, said the announcement is “a clear call for international solidarity” although she acknowledged that many countries would probably not have any Ebola cases.

“Countries affected to date simply do not have the capacity to manage an outbreak of this size and complexity on their own,” Chan said at a news conference in Geneva. “I urge the international community to provide this support on the most urgent basis possible.”

The agency had convened an expert committee this week to assess the severity of the continuing epidemic.

The current outbreak of Ebola began in Guinea in March and has since spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia, with a suspected cluster in Nigeria. There is no licensed treatment or vaccine for Ebola.

Public Health and KC hospitals have been planning for bio-emergency response for years, Duchin says, including response to anthrax, smallpox, and naturally-occurring infectious disease outbreaks and worked together effectively during SARS and the 2009 H1N1 outbreak.

Duchin says Public Health works closely with local hospitals to assure cases are identified promptly and managed properly, and that any potential contacts that may have been exposed to an Ebola case are identified and evaluated and monitored if needed.

“We do not anticipate that Ebola will pose a risk to the our population, even cases that are identified and treated in local hospitals.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.