Returning Ebola Workers Making Crisis Worse

Ebola Nurse with Fever Fights Quarantine

Maybe American doctors and nurses have too grandiose a sense of entitlement to be sent to treat  Ebola patients in Africa.  This is a painful admission for me to make. I have friends in West Africa and find it hard to sleep some nights worrying about their welfare and recognizing the urgency with which health care workers are needed to control the epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.   

But the behavior of the first two American health care workers to return from treating patients in West Africa has left me with an uneasy feeling.  Is there something endemic to our culture that brings out the narcissism and self-absorption in our doctors and nurses?  I hope such speculation is premature, and that the behavior of Dr. Craig Spencer and Nurse Kaci Hickox are aberrations.   

But there is no excuse for the lack of professionalism we have seen thus far from our returning health care workers. As you may recall, Dr. Spencer returned to the United States last week.  He is now hospitalized for Ebola, after telling a series of lies to immigration officials, and even the New York City police about his exposure to the disease and his whereabouts.   The headline in the London Daily Mail reads:

New York Ebola doctor 'LIED to police about his travel': NYPD discovered he rode subway, ate at restaurant and went bowling after cops checked his MetroCard 

• Dr Craig Spencer diagnosed with Ebola six days after returning to New York

• During that time he rode subways, caught a cab, and went out bowling

• But when officers quizzed him he said he was at home, it has been claimed

• When police pulled MetroCard and bank data they learned the truth.

This week's melodrama surrounds Kaci Hickox, an American nurse returning from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone  Ms. Hickox balked at being quarantined in New Jersey even though she registered a temperature, which is an early Ebola symptom.  After hiring a lawyer she was able to return home to Maine, but refuses to be quarantined at all and is going to court to get the restriction lifted.  

These health care workers, however skilled they are at their jobs, are fast becoming a national embarrassment.  The U.S. is probably better off offering incentives to doctors from less entitled countries to take the place of the American doctors, whose self-absorption and attitudes of entitlement are beginning to make them more trouble than they're worth.