What are your concerns about the Ebola virus?
The current trend with the Ebola scare is what bothers us, because of the way people are handling the entire process. It is really not an airborne disease. It is not something you contract from breathing the same air in the same environment with the sufferer. Often times it is through bodily contact with body fluids of the affected individual—saliva, sweat, sputum, which exudates from the sufferer. We encourage people not to stigmatize everybody they see on the road as though the individual is a sufferer.
I hear people are no longer shaking hands on the road because of Ebola. In as much as that is precautionary, simply using sanitary precautions might just be good enough. Frequent washing of hands, if you think you have touched any contaminated surfaces, using hand sanitisers are just enough. We want to avoid a situation where we begin to treat this like people initially treated HIV.
During the early days of that disease, especially in the early 1990s, people hardly wanted to touch the same spoon or eat from the same plate with an HIV patient, as if it is transmitted just by close contact.
The other preventive measure is building up one’s immunity through good nutritional approaches. We are talking about a viral ailment, and most times they overwhelm the body if the individual’s immunity is low in the first instance.
Eating good food and products with good antiviral properties can be supportive and preventive, so as not to expose oneself to an illness that will predispose an individual to catching that disease. Often time it depends on the pre-morbid state of the individual involved—how is your immune system?
Even as ordinary as malaria, many people have parasites in the bloodstream going around, but because their immune system has been built up over time, they don’t even come down with the signs and symptoms of malaria, because over time have maintained healthy health standards and that has helped their body resist common infections.
Why insist on preventive measures?
People should not be unnecessarily scared. Of course, be careful where you go, who you visit. If you must visit someone in hospital, ensure you maintain some safe distance from touching. Those are fine. Hospital based infections did not start today, it is present even in the developed world.
Forget Ebola, there are nosocomial infections that people can contract in the hospital, as healthcare workers, as individuals who go to hospital to visit or as somebody who is caring after a sick fellow. The same precaution we advise when nursing people in hospital is the same precaution we are asking people to take in terms of Ebola.
Thank God Ebola is not airborne, otherwise it would spread faster. I think the chances of catching Ebola are quite remote for an ordinary person walking on the street, except if we are dealing with a situation where a relative is caring for another relative who is a patient.
That is when the risk of infection becomes higher. In that case, such individual identified is put in isolation and the people nursing him take all preventive measures to protect themselves while nursing him. But just sharing a bus or taxi does not necessarily expose you.
Medical consultants association says motorists are at risk because of crowded buses and okada riders. But you seem to have a different opinion?
It has to be contact with bodily fluid. Except you are saying the taxi is so crowded that everybody inside is sweating to such a point where the sweat from one person is seeping into another person. Then avoid boarding a taxi that is already carrying enough passengers.
There are many illnesses people don’t understand. If the blood of a hepatitis C sufferer touches a person, it can be transmitted. Mark the word CAN. But it doesn’t mean it is automatic. A study has been done on harlots who are resistant to HIV. They are exposed daily, based on their profession to men who are HIV positive but at the end of the day, they remain negative. Some people just have this natural resistance which has the ability to fight off diseases.
For most viral ailments now we really don’t have drug treatments that can eradicate the virus, but there are preventive measures, and it is not everybody that is exposed that catches the illness.
Take common cold. People in a family in one or two rooms and everybody catches the illness but someone living in that house still doesn’t catch it, because his immune system is good enough to fight the disease. And that’s common cold, which is in the air, but this one [Ebola] needs physical contact.
If one is exposed to someone infected, is there any immediate action needed?
Go wash—a clean bath—and use any of the topical disinfectants.
Would that stop one getting infected with the virus?
If the individual identifies that yes, I could be at risk, it is possible, if it has not penetrated the skin already.
People should be calm. The anxiety out there is so frightening, and it is becoming dysfunctional. It is like me giving you a glass and saying, make sure the glass doesn’t fall from your hand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you are going to break that glass, because I have scared you already. Mistakes abound when we are in this frightened mode. There are food supplements and food contents we have locally here that you can increase your immunity, and they can help give you a preventive backup and help you fight off the disease, even if you are exposed to it.
