Dr. Kent Brantly: Lessons Learned From Fighting Ebola

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

A few months ago on the program, I spoke with a Dr. Kent Brantly, a medical missionary with the group Samaritan's Purse. He was living with his family in Liberia and contracted Ebola while taking care of patients there back in July. He was flown back to the U.S. and treated at Emory University. His was one of the first Western cases to grab international attention. We thought we'd check back with Dr. Brantley now to talk with him about his own recovery and the international response to the epidemic. Dr. Brantly, welcome back to the program.

DR. KENT BRANTLY: Thank you, Melissa. It's nice to be here.

BLOCK: And how are you feeling?

BRANTLY: I feel really well these days. I feel like my health is back to normal.

BLOCK: And how long did it take before you felt - I'm back to strength? I feel like I did before I got Ebola.

BRANTLY: About four - four and a half months.

BLOCK: Wow. That long?

BRANTLY: Yeah. And I'd say, I'm pretty fortunate to be back to normal that quickly, actually.

BLOCK: You've heard from others that it took them longer?

BRANTLY: Just any time a person is that critically ill for that long, it takes the body a long time to recover.

BLOCK: When you were at your sickest point, Dr. Brantly, with Ebola, were you fully confident that you would survive?

BRANTLY: No.

BLOCK: No?

BRANTLY: I wasn't. I remember when my condition declined dramatically, and I was having trouble breathing. And I remember looking at the nurse who was standing at my bedside -a guy named Tim Mosher. I looked up at Tim, and I said, I don't know how you're going to breathe for me when I quit breathing.

BLOCK: And was this when you were still in Liberia, or when you'd come to Emory?

BRANTLY: It's when I was still in Liberia, and they had no way to breathe for me if I quit breathing.

BLOCK: Dr. Brantly, we saw a lot of fear, even panic, over Ebola in this country. Ebola was even mentioned by some voters as an issue that was very much on their minds in November's election. Did that response in this country make sense to you, given what you knew about what was going on in West Africa?

BRANTLY: I think it's understandable why people were afraid and are afraid of Ebola. It's a terrifying disease. But I think the level of hysteria that we saw in this country was unnecessary. I think it's similar to the fear we see in West Africa. It's just a different permutation of that fear. In West Africa, the way you see that fear expressed is that people deny that they have Ebola, or they deny that Ebola is real. And they try to come up with other explanations for what is causing the problems all around them. And in this country, it was kind of the opposite. We were afraid that everyone's going to get Ebola. But both of those are responses out of fear, instead of out of knowledge. And I think we need to be educated to help diminish that fear, and we need to allow our sense of compassion to trump our sense of fear.

BLOCK: I'm curious whether you hear that same note of fear if you talk to doctors, nurses, relief workers in this country who might be hesitating about going to West Africa to do work there. Do you hear that same theme and those same hesitations?

BRANTLY: I think fear is one of the factors that is preventing some health care workers in the United States from going to West Africa to help. But I don't think it's the only or maybe not even the biggest barricade to their service. It's not fear of Ebola. It's fear of how they'll be treated when they come back - not knowing whether their job will be secure or whether their family or their friends will look at them differently after they've been in the hot zone, so to speak.

BLOCK: And what do you tell them about that?

BRANTLY: When I've had the chance to speak to groups of physicians, one of the things I tell them is that people who are willing to go - I encourage them - go. And for those who may be aren't able or willing to go, the role they can play is as important. And that is to enable their colleagues to go by being supportive, by taking care of those colleagues' patients, by covering their call shifts, by treating them with gratitude and respect when they return.

BLOCK: I want to talk to you a bit about the U.S. government's response to this epidemic, and I want to play you a bit of tape. This is from our interview back in September when I asked you about the U.S. response at that time. Here's what you said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BRANTLY: We've waited two and a half months since I was told the U.S. government put their eye on the situation. We cannot afford to wait another two and half months. We cannot afford to wait two and a half weeks. We must act now.

BLOCK: So I wonder if, thinking back - that was about three months ago that you told me that. How would you assess the U.S. response since then?

BRANTLY: I think it's a good thing that this is still a conversation in our government and in our public - that the president requested increased funding for Ebola response and that we've not forgotten about it. I think people are still dying every day in West Africa from Ebola. And that sense of urgency that I expressed back in September - it's still very much there. And it's important that we put that sense of urgency back in the public conversation. If we really lull ourselves into a sense of complacency, it will only be a matter of time before something like that skyrocketing of cases happens again, and the world will have to take notice.

BLOCK: I wonder, Dr. Brantly, what the conversation you've had is within your own family about Ebola and your experience and your survival.

BRANTLY: My 4-year-old son prays every night for his best friend who is his same age. He's our next-door neighbor in Liberia - a little Liberian boy. He prays every night. Dear God, please don't let him get Ebola. And I'm thankful that he says that prayer. I'm proud of him. But that's not a prayer that a 4-year-old should have to consider. Our family is consumed with thoughts and conversations about Ebola. We still have a lot of friends and colleagues who are in the trenches in Liberia to fight this outbreak, and we pray for them every day.

BLOCK: That 4-year-old boy in Liberia - Dr. Brantly, do you have any way of keeping tabs on him, finding out how he's doing?

BRANTLY: We do. He and his mother are doing OK, for now.

BLOCK: You must worry about them.

BRANTLY: We worry about them. We worry about our other friends. A lesson I've learned through all of this is that we need to worry about the people we don't know just as much as we worry about the people we do know. We all have a tendency to have compassion for the people that we know and the people we love. When we can get to a point where we feel that same sense of empathy and compassion for people who are suffering, even though we don't know them, I think that's what Jesus is talking about when he says love your neighbor as yourself.

BLOCK: Dr. Brantly, thanks so much for talking to us again.

BRANTLY: Thank you, Melissa.

BLOCK: That's Dr. Kent Brantly. He's with the Christian international relief organization Samaritan's Purse in North Texas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.