Duty of care and health worker protections in the age of Ebola: lessons from Médecins Sans Frontières

McDiarmid, Melissa; Crestani, Rosa

In the special case of public health emergencies, unique threats arising from the complexity of urgent care delivery add to the heightened health worker occupational risk. This was especially evident in the Ebola context, where significant health worker infections and deaths occurred during the initial emergence and in subsequent early hospital-based outbreaks. 6 Recent review of the largely WHO-led Ebola response of 2014 to 2015 examined health worker infections and deaths. Though exact numbers were never finalised, two-thirds of the 815 known and presumed health workers infected were reported to have died of the disease. The estimated cumulative Ebola Virus Disease incidence rate for health workers was reported to range from about 30 to 44 per 1000 persons depending on job title, compared with the non-health worker rate of 1.4 per 1000. 6 Compare this to the incidence rate of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) health workers, at about 4.3 per 1000 based on 28 infections among about 6500 responders. 7