The call came in on a Friday morning, as Dr. Michael S. Phillips worked at his desk at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan. A patient had arrived in the emergency room burning with fever after returning from a trip to Liberia.
Dr. Phillips knew instantly what this might mean: Ebola.
Within minutes, he dispatched one member of his staff to make sure that the sick man remained isolated and that doctors and nurses were taking precautions to protect themselves against contracting the virus. Then he turned to a second staff member.
"Stop what you're doing right now," Dr. Phillips told him, and sent him to the hospital's laboratory.
The lab?
Dr. Phillips, the director of the infection prevention and control unit at NYU Langone, was already envisioning what his staff had not: a tube of the patient's blood, loaded with the Ebola virus, landing in the hospital's nerve center and contaminating thousands of blood and tissue samples, endangering lab technicians and potentially bringing operations at the hospital to a halt.
"It bumps your pulse up a bit," Dr. Phillips said, with considerable understatement, as he recalled that hectic Aug. 1 morning.
The patient, it turned out, did not have the virus. But with an Ebola epidemic spreading across West Africa, Dr. Phillips and hospital epidemiologists in New York City are grappling with yet another worry as they go about their day-to-day work of preventing, tracking and controlling potentially deadly infections and diseases.
Last week found Dr. Phillips phoning into a conference call with the city's health department to get the latest guidance on Ebola and updating the hospital's protocols to include Nigeria among the West African countries affected by the epidemic.
Meanwhile, the tall, genial doctor and his staff were keeping tabs on other potential threats: Chikungunya, the mosquito-borne illness that has invaded the Caribbean; the virus known as MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome; and far more common maladies like tuberculosis, influenza, measles and the bacterial infections that sometimes surface and spread within hospitals.
Dr. Phillips, 50, is married and the father of three girls, and his mother still worries about his exposure to microscopic bugs.
But he has been hardened by battle after nearly 15 years of working in New York, an international crossroads that draws thousands of far-flung tourists, some of whom carry invisible illnesses along with their travel guides.
"I still get stressed, of course," Dr. Phillips said. "But worry is not a good option. We have to make sure our processes are in place and think about how we can constantly improve our game."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/nyregion/fighting-deadly-diseases-without-breaking-a-sweat.html?
