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Local Health Officials On Alert Due To Ebola Scare

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — The Ebola infection of a Dallas nurse has shaken the medical world and put health officials on alert from California to Connecticut.

At the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, the head of infectious-disease control acknowledges keeping health workers safe from the virus requires a difficult and complicated protocol.

"The required process for Ebola is significantly more difficult. So, I think knowing the process and being able to do the process reliably every single time are two totally separate things," infectious disease specialist Zachary Rubin said.

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Training isn't the only problem. The United States has only 19 beds in four hospitals nationwide with biocontainment units designed for patients with the most dangerous infectious diseases like Ebola, none of which are close to California. They are: the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md.; the medical center at the University of Nebraska; the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta; and St. Patrick Hospital near the Rocky Mountain Labs in Missoula, Mont., a 17-and-a-half hour drive from Los Angeles covering more than 1,200 miles.

Other hospitals, like Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, have an isolation unit as well. But the training, level of isolation and design is not up to what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call a bio-standard Level 4 facility.

The Olive View isolation unit was designed for tuberculosis patients. Now, the CDC says, every state should have a biocontainment unit like the four existing.

For now, medical professionals like Tomas Aragon, a public health officer in San Francisco, say other hospitals will do the best they can.

"They have the capability. They have people who are highly trained in taking care of patients with infectious diseases, putting on personal protective equipment, etc.," Aragon said. "The difference now is because Ebola is so deadly, because this disease is very different than anything we've faced before, is that hospitals are currently working to get their level of competency up."

David Baron, an infectious-disease expert and former chief of staff at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica, says the protocol is so demanding that health workers caring for Ebola patients sometimes break down from what he calls "vigilance fatigue."

"You're vigilant, vigilant, vigilant to adhere to the guidelines and then at some point, people I think — and sometimes with the best of intentions and the best of professionals — get a little, you know, forgetful," he said.

The CDC acknowledges it will take a considerable amount of time to create the highest level biomedical containment units in California and every other state in the country.

In the meantime, health officials are grappling with how to transport Ebola patients across long distances to be treated in appropriate isolation units.

For more information about the Ebola virus, visit the CDC and World Health Organization websites.

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