BIDDEFORD — For about a week, Maine has been making national headlines as a state health care worker who worked with Ebola patients in West Africa has defied quarantine orders since her return from Sierra Leone on Oct. 24.
In the latest action, on Friday, Aroostook County District Court Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere ruled that Kaci Hickox does not have to abide by the voluntary quarantine for medical workers who have treated Ebola patients, according to The Associated Press.
Because the nurse is not showing symptoms, the judge says she’s not infectious.
However, he said, she should continue daily monitoring and coordinate travel with state officials.
Hickox contended confinement at her home in Fort Kent violated her rights.
The state went to court Thursday, following through with a threat to try to isolate her until the 21-day incubation period for Ebola ends on Nov. 10.
Regarding the judge’s ruling, Gov. Paul LePage said in a prepared statement, “As governor, I have done everything I can to protect the health and safety of Mainers. The judge has eased restrictions with this ruling, and I believe it is unfortunate. However, the state will abide by law.”
Despite state officials’ concerns, Dr. Dora Mills, former director for the Maine Center of Disease Control and Prevention, said she believes the public has little to fear from medical workers who worked with Ebola patients in West Africa but have no symptoms of the disease.
The disease is most prevalent in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Health care workers should be safe as long as they followed proper precautions and didn’t experience a high-risk incident, like getting stuck with a needle that had been used on someone who had Ebola, said Mills, who is now the vice president of clinical affairs at the University of New England in Biddeford.
People “are not contagious when they don’t have symptoms,” she said. Some of the symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea and malaise.
In addition, said Mills, even when people have symptoms “they are not contagious for the first day or two.”
The Ebola virus is found in body secretions, she said, adding that it is only the secretions of people who are very sick ”“ people who aren’t likely to be walking around ”“ that are dangerous.
Mills said she agrees with an opinion piece written by several doctors that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine on Oct. 27, which states, “We have very strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid. Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious.”
Currently, there are no known cases of Ebola in Maine; there are only four known cases of the deadly disease in the entire U.S.
Those cases include two people who contracted the disease in West Africa, one of who has since died, and two health care professionals who contracted the disease in the U.S. while caring for the now deceased patient when he was very sick, and when they weren’t fully protected, said Mills.
“If (Ebola) were really contagious, there wouldn’t be two people (who caught the disease in the U.S.) there would be two million,” she said.
In West Africa, where the disease is more widespread, there are approximately 13,700 total cases with 7,600 confirmed by laboratories, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s of a population of approximately 340 million.
“If it were easily contagious,” said Mills, there would have been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people with Ebola” in that part of the world.
Rather than concern about Americans contracting Ebola from returning medical workers, Mills said she is more concerned about the American public’s fear of this.
In order to contain and eradicate the disease, Mills said more health care workers are needed to volunteer to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. Most who go, volunteer for six weeks. But if they were required to take an additional three weeks off from work to abide by a 21-day quarantine, said Mills, fewer people would volunteer.
Because of the fear of the public, she said, she has friends who were planning to volunteer to travel across the globe to treat Ebola patients, but they changed their minds. They fear that not only will they be stigmatized, but their children would be as well.
The hysteria surrounding the disease in the U.S. is unfounded, said Mills.
“I have friends who are health care workers who are coming back” from treating Ebola patients in West Africa, she said. “If they’re not symptomatic or not at high risk, I’d be glad to have them at my house for dinner.”
— The Associated Press contributed to this article. Staff Writer Dina Mendros can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 324 or dmendros@journaltribune.com.
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