Patients at the hospital show symptoms of Ebola. Suspecting a different sort of infection, doctors prescribe antibiotics. Then nurses fall sick.
It’s the beginning of an Ebola outbreak, and health experts are distressed by mistakes at the hospital that let the deadly disease spread.
But it’s not Dallas in 2014 — it’s Kikwit, a medium-size city in Congo, central Africa, in 1995.
The echoes from many outbreaks in Africa are strong: Doctors missed warning signs when the virus showed up in their country. Nurses said their training and gear were inadequate.
As will be the case in Dallas, better medical attention eventually snuffs out each outbreak. But over and over, caregivers have to relearn lessons from the past.
Those who have dealt with outbreaks in Africa say that passing on knowledge from one generation of doctors to the next is critical. Continual vigilance and training is mandatory. Research and documentation are vital. Otherwise, Ebola will win.

“I’m persuaded that they didn’t have anybody there with an institutional memory, with specific experience, and there were assumptions all around of competence,” said Joseph McCormick, regional dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus. “Certainly with Ebola, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
U.S. hospitals need to pay attention to what has happened in Africa, Dallas and, now, New York City to stack the odds in their favor, experts say.
“I think if you really manage to analyze what happened in great detail, there are very valuable lessons to learn,” said Dr. Matthias Borchert, a German doctor now fighting Ebola in Liberia with the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee. It’s his fifth epidemic treating diseases like Ebola.
“Does that mean another provider will never make the same mistake again? You can never guarantee that,” he said. “Humans will make mistakes.”...“Misdiagnosis is absolutely typical of an Ebola epidemic,” said Dr. C.J. Peters, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who helped during the Kikwit outbreak while working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

A Nigerian drug mule has died in a Spanish airport after cocaine bags inside his body split open – because airport staff refused to touch him fearing he had Ebola.

The man collapsed in the customs area of the Madrid-Barajas airport outside the capital after arriving on a flight from Istanbul.

Upon hearing that the man was from Nigeria, staff were too afraid to approach the man and left him in shivers on the airport floor.

The Nigerian drug smuggler was left to his death at Madrid’s main airport after several bags of cocaine burst in his stomach. He spent 50 minutes without any medical attention as he was deemed an Ebola risk after he started shaking on the floor.

The man had arrived at Madrid-Barajas airport Terminal 1 on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul when the bags of cocaine apparently burst in his stomach. He quickly succumbed to the symptoms of a cocaine overdose.