Ebola-health-care-workers-China-jpg.jpg (Photo : Reuters)
Dr. Craig Spencer, a New York doctor that had been infected with the Ebola virus has spoken about his experiences as a doctor and then as a victim and survivor of the Ebola virus, reports Tech Times. He has now written an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine describing all of his experiences.
Dr. Spencer was working as an on-duty-doctor in the emergency department of New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. He joined Medicins Sans Frontier ("Doctors Without Borders") and went to work in Guinea in Africa on medical assignments. His duties took him straight into the heart of a major Ebola epidemic outbreak in Guinea in early 2014.
In Guinea he treated Ebola patients endlessly and probably himself became infected with the virus during this time, the New York Times has reported. When he returned to New York he was moving around town as any regular New Yorker would, before symptoms of the disease started showing on him.
In New York, there was a lot of speculation and criticism in the media about his every private move and daily routines. The media, Dr. Spencer felt, was unreasonably and exaggeratedly over-hyping the situation. As he has written, "(I)nstead of being welcomed as respected humanitarians, my U.S. colleagues who have returned home from battling Ebola have been treated as pariahs."
Certain politicians, according to him, also played on the hype created by the media. In particular, Dr. Spencer criticizes both governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chris Christies of New Jersey for "trying to appear presidential in a panic situation".
It may be recalled that both New Jersey and New York had imposed quarantines on medical workers that had been treating Ebola patients in Africa. In response, the New York Health Department has issued a statement saying that their quarantine plans were intended to strike a balance between the situation of the medical workers and the needs of all New Yorkers.
Dr. Spencer has written that, even though treating Ebola patients was fraught with huge medical risks, it was also personally cathartic for him.
