Ebola Survivors Should Go Treat Ebola, Experts Suggest

​It is probably a fairly safe assumption that, if one were to contract Ebola and recover from it, the first place he or she would think about returning would not be an Ebola clinic. But that's exactly where a group of prominent researchers is suggesting they go—in fact, the group believes that Ebola survivors might have the best shot at bringing the epidemic under control in Western Africa.

Why? Because, in theory, Ebola survivors should now be immune to the current outbreak.

With no American cases diagnosed for quite some time now, Ebola has fallen out of the mainstream news cycle. But, as we noted this weekend, the outbreak continues to spiral out of control in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and continues to worsen in Guinea as well.

So far, there have been more than 17,290 cases of Ebola diagnosed this year. Clinics are overrun, there are few volunteers who can (or are willing to) help out, and there have been reports of victims dying outside while waiting for a hospital bed. Other reports suggest that "people are disappearing into the forest to die."

So, yeah, it's still bad. In an editorial published last night in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Zena Stein and several of her colleagues from the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University suggest that it's time to start employing survivors to get this thing under control. They even go so far as to suggest that they should be the ones treating new patients.

"Survivors of Ebola infection are valuable resources still largely overlooked in the struggle to contain the epidemic," she wrote. "In a sense, survivors are the only people in the world who are 'vaccinated' against further Ebola infection with the strain in circulation. This uniquely positions them to mediate between the infected and uninfected and between local people and foreign responders."

Beyond that, Stein suggests that Ebola survivors should donate their blood so that it can be transferred to current victims, a treatment that's unproven but appears promising. Their blood can also be used to further vaccine research.

Stein and her colleagues do raise a good point: The thousands of Ebola survivors (there is roughly a 30 percent survival rate in West Africa) are really the only people on Earth who can, in theory, interact with people who are currently infected without fear of contracting the virus.

So far, no one has ever gotten Ebola twice, according to a New York Times report. But the Times notes the theory has "never been formally tested, because it is unethical to deliberately try to reinfect someone with a fatal disease."

Already, one British nurse, Will Pooley, has returned to West Africa to continue treating the disease. He was told by health officials that his immunity could not be guaranteed.

"[Health officials in the UK] have told me I very likely have immunity, at least for the near future, to this strain of Ebola," he told The Guardian. "I have also been told it's a possibility that I don't, so I will just have to act as if I don't."

In her paper, Stein notes that survivors' immunity "can be established through blood tests."

But the current outbreak in West Africa has been so bad in part because of the spread of misinformation within local communities who are hesitant to trust foreigners (and who can blame them?), and in part because of a general failure to educate the public about what the risks are. In order for her plan to work, people who have already dealt with an excruciating disease are going to have to be convinced that they can re-expose themselves to it without fear of repeating their episode.

Stein admits that there's likely to be a "stigmatization of survivors as carriers of disease," and said that new education campaigns will be needed to "inform affected communities that the recovered pose no threat to the uninfected, and, rather, have an important role in controlling the epidemic and caring for the sick."

In the end, she suggests that it might be the best shot we've got: "Training survivors has the potential to save untold thousands of lives and decrease the likelihood of infections spreading to unaffected populations."