Why we need to stop stigmatising Ebola volunteers

When Holly McFadden, an Australian nurse based in Britain, came back from helping to treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, she didn’t get much of a hero’s welcome.

Invitations to “parties and stuff like that” were definitely not forthcoming, she recalls.

Rather, she has faced an uphill struggle to explain the virus to others.

Until an outbreak of Ebola was identified in West Africa a year ago, few Westerners had even heard of the disease first identified in what was then Zaire in 1976 and named after the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo River.

“There’s not a lot of education in Britain about the disease process,” McFadden told me. “You have to do a lot of sit down talks.”

“With my flatmate, when I first told her I was going to Sierra Leone she was really nervous. She thought she’d have to move out of the flat and wouldn’t be able to share ice cream with me,” she said.

According to a British Red Cross poll published today, 72 percent of British adults believe healthcare workers who have been treating Ebola patients should automatically have a period of quarantine.

More than half (56 percent) worry that these healthcare workers could spread the virus in Britain.

The poll also showed that only a third of British adults would be willing to have a face to face conversation with someone returning from an Ebola-affected country.

Yet, 78 percent of British adults support and admire health professionals who work in Ebola-affected countries.

Despite widespread media coverage of the outbreak, there’s clearly a long way to go to ensure that the nature of the transmission of the virus – through blood, vomit, diarrhoea and other bodily fluids – is fully understood.

The problem has been even more acute in the hardest-hit countries – Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – where the outbreak has killed more than 10,000 people – and where many survivors are shunned by their communities.

“If someone is not symptomatic, they’re not contagious. Normal social interaction is fine,” Pete Jones, Ebola response manager for the British Red Cross, told me. “What’s required is the exchange of bodily fluids through mucus membranes.”

“The doctors and nurses who have volunteered in this Ebola outbreak have provided life-saving care in some of the most difficult conditions there are,” he said.

“The last thing we should be doing is stigmatising them.”

This article is published in collaboration with The Thomson Reuters Foundation. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Joseph D’Urso is an Intern at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

Image: Health workers put on protective gear before entering a quarantine zone at a Red Cross facility. REUTERS/Baz Ratner.