Dallas faced an unprecedented public health scare in the fall of 2014 when a Liberian national was diagnosed with the Ebola virus. KERA is exploring lessons learned – and taking a deeper look at what happened last year – in anew series called Surviving Ebola.
Explore the KERA digital project here. There’s a timeline of Ebola-related events, voices of those most affected by the virus, and much more.
After Thomas Eric Duncan died of Ebola, the federal government designated 55 hospitals nationwide as Ebola treatment centers. Two are in Texas: The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Texas Children’s is designing an isolation unit specifically for kids.
At their campus in Katy, workers are building an entirely new unit, with one wing designed for highly infectious diseases.
Dr. Judith Campbell handles infection control at Texas Children’s. She helped design the isolation unit, which has eight beds behind locked doors.
“A year ago in the United States, there were only 12 beds for the entire country for patients that had a need to be isolated in a biocontainment unit,” Campbell said. “And, not surprisingly, zero of those beds were designated for children.”
