Meet the Ebola Doctor Who Trump Viciously Attacked on Twitter
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/ebola-craig-spencer-trump-tweeted-now-those-fighting-the-next-outbreak/
Meet the Ebola Doctor Who Trump Viciously Attacked on Twitter
Craig Spencer says the president is crippling our ability to fight the disease.
Megan Jula | May. 21, 2018 6:00 AM
In November 2014, Dr. Craig Spencer walked out of New Yorks Bellevue Hospital cured of Ebola. He was the last American diagnosed with the disease in the US.
During the nearly three weeks Spencer spent in the hospital, his liver started to fail, and he lost 20 pounds. But thanks to the treatment he received, including an experimental drug and plasma donated by a patient who had recovered from Ebola, he overcame a disease that would claim more than 11,300 lives during the West Africa Ebola epidemic. Of the 11 patients treated in the US, two died. One was a Liberian man visiting family in Texas who had initially been misdiagnosed at a Dallas hospital. The other was a surgeon from Sierra Leone and a permanent resident of the United States who arrived at a Nebraska hospital in critical condition; he died two days later.
The Ebola epidemic that infected Spencer was declared over in 2016, but the disease routinely flares up. During a current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 26 people have already died.
Spencer, an emergency medicine doctor, caught Ebola while treating patients for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea. He didnt show any symptoms when he first returned to New York, but after developing a low fever, Spencer rushed to Bellevue, where he was diagnosed. The 36 hours he spent in New York City before entering the hospital were quickly scrutinized, and generated panic that he might have spread the disease. He even caught the attention of Donald Trump, who tweeted: