Two Ebola patients who fled quarantine may have exposed dozens to virus

Thursday, May 24, 2018
By Paul Martin

By Siobhán O’Grady
WashingtonPost.com
May 24,2018

Health officials in Congo are anxious to contain the country’s deadly Ebola outbreak — which has already spread to an urban area — before the situation gets any worse. But controlling the virus may have just gotten tougher.

On Thursday, a senior Doctors Without Borders aid worker said that two patients infected with Ebola who fled their hospital on Monday night potentially exposed dozens of more people to the virus.

In a briefing in Geneva, Jean-Clement Cabrol, a doctor who had just returned from Congo, said “the patients were in the active phase of the disease, vomiting” when their families removed them from the hospital, put them on motorcycles, and took them to a religious gathering of 50 people. Ebola is contagious through bodily fluids, and both patients, who were at an acute phase of the illness, died within hours.

Those two were among the three Ebola patients who left a hospital isolation ward and reentered the general population, according to the Doctors Without Borders mission in the Congolese city of Mbandaka.

One patient left Sunday, shortly before being discharged, and is still alive, according to the aid group. The two others who attended the prayer gathering left overnight Monday; one died outside of quarantine, and another was brought back to the hospital and died there.

“In all three cases, every effort was made by staff at the hospital to convince the patients — and their families — not to leave and to continue their treatment,” Brienne Prusak, a press officer for MSF, as Doctors Without Borders is frequently known, said in a statement.

“It is unfortunate but not unexpected,” said WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic. “It is normal for people to want the loved ones to be at home during what could be the last moments of life.”

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