Rick Sacra, MD, discussing the importance of the NBU

November 2023

I mean, one of the things I would say is that—because I was hospitalized again in Massachusetts a few weeks after I came back to Massachusetts. I was hospitalized again because I developed a little fever and a cough and then my eye, the vision of my eye went bad. I had a uveitis from a late complication from the Ebola, but when I got the fever and the cough, they were worried that this—nobody really understood Ebola yet. Could it recur? Could you get Ebola again after you'd cleared it? They had to put me back in the unit on isolation here in Worcester, here at UMass, but having a team who was, first of all, not fully trained, not to the level that the biocontainment unit people were, but also who was not enthusiastic about this situation. The biocontainment unit, these were people who'd been training for 10 years for this, who were really dedicated to it. I mean, it was like night and day. There was no comparison, and I don't blame that on the staff here in Worcester, but it just shows you the importance of having a unit like the NBU. When you're dealing with a high stress and frankly risky situation like this, you cannot just put this on your typical healthcare worker and say, “You're getting duty in the unit today.” You have to have a dedicated volunteer staff and that just makes a huge difference.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives