was leaving the hospital for the day when a maternity
nurse told him a woman had just been transferred
from the maternity ward to the Intensive Care Unit
and was having trouble breathing. Because of an Ebola
outbreak that had started in the nearby province of
North Kivu in August, LaRochelle was supposed to
wear gloves with every patient. The hospital had re-
ceived shipments of thermometers and protective
clothing and were paying screeners to monitor the
entrances, where they kept bottles of bleach just in
case. But LaRochelle was about to leave on his walk
home and, after following protective protocol for five
months with no actual Ebola patients, he had a bit of
vigilance fatigue. He walked up to the woman and lis-
tened to her lungs through his stethoscope.
LaRochelle had never seen a case of Ebola before,
but he put the signs together quickly: The woman was
agitated. She was bleeding from locations where doc-
tors had attempted to start IVs. Her eyes were red in
the way he had seen in photographs. She didn’t have
a fever, but her fetus had died, which was a horrible,
classic presentation of the disease. He asked a nurse to
find out where she was from. One of the woman’s fam-
ily members replied that she was from Otomaber, a vil-
lage where new cases of Ebola had been cropping up.
One of the screeners at the gate should have real-
ized what illness this woman had and taken her di-
rectly into the new isolation area they had built since
the outbreak began. In fact, she had been stopped.
But the woman was the daughter-in-law of the hospi-
tal’s chauffeur, and he had either not realized, or been
so concerned for her, that he convinced the screen-
ers that she was not a safety risk. When the woman
was transferred from the maternity ward to the ICU,
which is in a different building, none of the suspi-
cions came with her. Now, LaRochelle was treating
her with his bare hands.
Later, LaRochelle would hear that you’re consid-
ered a high-risk exposure in the United States if
you touch an Ebola patient within the last 24 hours
of their life.
He had treated this woman within her last four.
Four and a half years earlierJuly 26, 2014, was a Saturday, and Dent Thomp-
son was five days deep into a 10-day vacation at
his second home, on Beech Mountain in North
Carolina. The place could be on a summer-camp
brochure, a Swiss-style chalet situated on a 4,500-
foot ridgeline with a 100-mile view into the shaggy
blue forests of the middle Appalachians. Thompson
had just settled in on the back deck with a Bud Light
Left:
Humanitarian
doctor Kent
Brantly was
the first
Ebola patient
evacuated
from West
Africa
(Writebol was
the second).
Right:
The ABCS
containment
system inside
the specialized
Gulfstream III.and a magazine when his phone rang. Area code- Washington, D.C.
On the other end of the line was the no-nonsense
mid-Atlantic voice of William Walters, the managing
director of operational medicine for the U.S. Depart-
ment of State. Walters had been on the opposite of
vacation for the past 24 hours, organizing the evacu-
ation of some 150 people from the U.S. embassy in
Tripoli because of violence in Libya. The State De-
partment hadn’t wanted a repeat of Benghazi, but
Walters had missed his wife’s birthday, which he
didn’t expect she’d forget for some time.
Walters had slept for just two hours before the lat-
est problem appeared. “Do you think the system you
have would work for Ebola?” he said.
Thompson and Walters had only met about six
months or so before that day, when the State Depart-
ment had worked with Phoenix Air, the company
Thompson managed, to prepare an air-ambulance
service plan for the Sochi Olympics. If a dignitary
had suffered some kind of medical incident at the
games, the last thing the U.S. government wanted
was a military plane swooping in and creating un-
settling optics. Instead, they would call Phoenix Air,
84 July/August 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com