The US response to Ebola was documented in Operation Ebola: Surgical care during the West African outbreak in Chapter 2, “The United States domestic response to Ebola: Experience of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.”
Angela Hewlett MD, MS and Daniel Johnson MD
The Nebraska Biocontainment Unit (NBU) was designed to care for patients with highly infectious diseases while protecting health care workers, a need brought to the forefront in 2003 when many health care workers became ill while caring for patients with SARS. The concept of a biocontainment patient care unit was nothing new; however, there were only a few such units in the United States. Since there were no national standards for these units, experts from existing units assembled and published a consensus statement in 2006 detailing the design, planning, and operations of biocontainment patient care units. In spite of this guidance, biocontainment patient care units remained a rarity in the U.S., mostly due to funding constraints.
From 2005-2014 the NBU remained ready to receive patients with highly infectious diseases, however, this did not occur. Often I (AH) was asked “what did you do for 9 years if you had no patients?” My response was that we were quite busy in spite of not having an active patient in the NBU. We planned and executed quarterly drills with the entire health care team, performed multiple research projects on appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) use, decontamination, and modeling of pathogen trajectory, and led a significant amount of education of health care workers and first responders in the community. Was the NBU a part of my job? Certainly. Was it the main component of my job? Definitely not. This changed dramatically in 2014.
To read more about the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit’s role in caring for Ebola, get a copy of Operation Ebola: Surgical care during the West African outbreak available at Amazon or from Johns Hopkins University Press
Operation Health: A series of books on surgery and global health from Johns Hopkins University Press 