Health Care Workers, Officials Gather To Discuss Possibility Of Ebola In Wisconsin

Health care workers and government officials met on Tuesday in Milwaukee to discuss how Wisconsin would handle an Ebola outbreak, more than two days after a nurse in Dallas was diagnosed with the disease.

More than 200 people representing community health organizations, advocacy groups, government agencies, hospitals and emergency responders were expected to attend the meeting in Milwaukee. Karen McKeown, administrator of the Division of Public Health for the state of Wisconsin, said the atmosphere was positive.

“I think the general feeling was that we’ve been doing a lot of work to prepare for this, and that we just want to make sure that we have all the latest guidance and that we’re up to date and practicing it and rehearsing it and just continuing to prepare,” she said.

But Nasia Safdar, medical director for infection control at University of Wisconsin Hospitals, said preparation only goes so far.

“I think (it’s) one thing to prepare for something when it’s a complete abstract,” said Safdar. “So it’s true that we’ve been preparing for years for things that are relatively abstract. I would not say that we’ve been prepared for Ebola for years.”

McKeown pointed out it’s highly unlikely that an Ebola case will surface in Wisconsin. Tony Goldberg, associate director for research at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, said the state still needs to prepare.

“It’s not a zero risk,” he said. “A lot of people will remember back to the monkey pox outbreak we had about 10 years ago, which was also an exotic disease from Africa that wound up in Wisconsin. So it’s not unprecedented.”

So far, there have only been two patients diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S.