Video chat offers students glimpse of Ebola response

Most people have a few - or a lot - of unanswered questions about the deadly Ebola virus that has killed nearly 5,000 people in western Africa and one man in the United States. But not too many get to ask those questions of the professionals on the front lines combating the disease.

Students in advanced placement biology at Maria Carrillo High School got that chance Thursday. Speaking over the video chat program Skype with officials at a New Jersey hospital and Maryland-based pharmaceutical company, the students asked questions ranging from “What’s your opinion of the use of robots to deal with Ebola-infected patients?” to “How does transmission of Ebola differ from the transmission of a disease like HIV?”

The video conference was part of a countywide effort to increase students’ access to experts using available technology, said Matt O’Donnell, a technology innovation specialist for the Sonoma County Office of Education.

“Learning has to happen beyond the textbook,” he said.

Junior Allie Ahern said before the video chat began that she was eager to interview experts after reading about the Ebola outbreak in class.

“We’re trying to see how we can use different types of media to connect what we’re learning to things in the world,” she said. “Instead of reading about stuff, we can actually talk to someone who is experienced.”

Thursday, O’Donnell set up a low-tech system consisting of a $50 video camera and a laptop to film students. Then, using Skype, he connected the class with two officials at East Orange General Hospital in New Jersey, where a man who had visited western Africa last Saturday walked into the hospital with a fever, putting staff on high alert. Police locked down the emergency room while medics examined the man, news stations reported. He was cleared after testing negative for the disease.

“How prepared was your staff to deal with Ebola?” one student asked.

“We’ve never had a case of Ebola on the continent prior to” this year, replied Juliet Brown, the hospital’s manager for infection control. “But we are trained to deal with communicable disease and a lot of the process is the same for Ebola.”

However, she said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently mandated an extra level of protective clothing after a nurse treating an Ebola patient in Texas contracted the disease.

Another student asked what Brown and her colleague Rosa Rosales thought of the recent quarantines of medical workers returning from Africa. Recently, New Jersey officials controversially isolated a nurse returning from Sierra Leone in a sparsely furnished tent at a hospital after she registered a low fever. The same nurse, Kaci Hickox of Maine - who has not shown symptoms of the virus and tested negative for it after being quarantined in New Jersey - is now in a high-profile standoff with Maine officials who want to extend her isolation through home quarantine.

Rosales, who emphasized she was sharing her personal opinion, said she and other nurses believe people who have worked with infected patients should first be given the chance to quarantine themselves at home, rather than being immediately forced to do so.

Students also spoke with researchers at Integrated BioTherapeutics who have worked on developing a vaccine and drugs, or therapeutics, for Ebola.

“How accessible are the therapeutics and a potential vaccine?” one student asked.

Researcher Julia Biggins replied that no FDA-approved vaccine or treatment currently exists and that experimental drugs have been used to treat some U.S. patients. It’s not yet clear how effective those drugs have been.

The Maria Carrillo juniors and seniors spent three days preparing for the conference by reading articles and scientific papers about the disease, then crafting questions for the professionals, said their teacher, Anna VanDordrecht.

She wanted them to learn “how to access media and form your own opinion when its a very controversial and sometimes hysterical topic,” she said. “Students are seeing information all over Facebook and everywhere else, hearing that Ebola is scary and it’s going to get you. There’s something very powerful about getting the information yourself to decide what you think,” she said.

She added that she hopes her voting-age students will apply the same critical-thinking techniques to sorting through all the campaign information before Tuesday’s election.

Studying Ebola also provided her class a real-world glimpse into upcoming course matter: Students will start reading about DNA and viruses next week, she said.

“What did you think of that versus reading the articles?” VanDordrecht asked students after the video chat.

“Oh, it was so much better,” said junior Shahab Yazdanpanah.

He and other students said they liked being able to ask follow-up questions when they didn’t quite understand what someone said. They also appreciated how scientific and objective the experts’ answers seemed.

“Wow, that was a rush,” junior Cristal Reagh said after class. “Talking with people who do this for a career, who love to do this - that enriched the experience for me.

“I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about Ebola before this,” she added. “I’d read on the news about how it might be a big deal. Doing the research helped me realize people might be overreacting.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.