The immense pain and suffering of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa resonated through Dallas when the news of Thomas Eric Duncan’s death was announced Wednesday morning.
Eleven days after his admission to Texas Health Presbyterian hospital in northeast Dallas, Duncan died from Ebola in an isolation ward.
Modern medicine didn’t save his life.
Modern public health strategies have not stopped the epidemic from spreading to his home country of Liberia, where he fell victim to the cruel disease.
Once Duncan became infected, like nearly 4,000 other Liberians, the virus worked its way through his body, slowly shutting down his liver and kidneys.
As a physician heavy with sadness, disappointment and a feeling of failure, I can only imagine life in West Africa right now.
My former colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been deployed to Guinea and Sierra Leone. They have returned home shell-shocked, despite their experience of working in other war-torn and disease-ridden countries.
They have told me of “clinics” that lack running water and rubber gloves. Places where patients lie on the floor and die, far away from family and loved ones.
Dallas is not West Africa. And although there is no specific treatment for Ebola, hopes were high that with the sophisticated level of medical care available here, Duncan would pull through.
Supportive treatment — including intravenous hydration, kidney dialysis and blood transfusions — and experimental drugs seem to have helped American Ebola patients who were airlifted to the U.S. for treatment. All of them survived.
Duncan was not so lucky.
Once again, Ebola outwitted us.
Today, we mourn his loss, pray for his family and the thousands others affected by this virus in West Africa.
Dr. Seema Yasmin, a former epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a physician and a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Follow her on Twitter at @DoctorYasmin.
