Saint Vincent graduate talks about Ebola field work
Saint Vincent College graduate Dr. Bryan E. Christensen said recently that he feels he is making a difference as a member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Ebola response team.
He recently returned from a 15-day trip to Nigeria where performed field work in Lagos.
“It was the craziest, most interesting work I’ve done to date,” Christensen said. “This is my first experience working in a country with a high level of terrorism. My work focused predominately on infection control. We traveled in armored vehicles and had armed escort after 6 p.m. My colleagues and I trained local physicians and nurses on proper infection control principles and practices with emphasis on personal protective equipment.”
Christensen said he also worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Doctors without Borders on the construction of a new Ebola hospital.
“At no point in my education would I have ever thought I would learn how to build an Ebola hospital,” he said.
Upon his return to the United States, Christensen said he has continued to support the Ebola response from the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
His work in the field has been featured on CNN and in The New York Times.
An epidemiologist with the U.S. Public Health Service’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Environmental Health Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects Air Pollution and Respiratory Health Branch, the Ligonier native earned a bachelor of arts degree in biology with a minor in religious studies from Saint Vincent College in 2001. After a brief stint at Duquesne Law School, he earned a master’s degree in environmental science engineering at Penn State and a Ph.D. in environmental health engineering at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
He became involved in the Ebola response as a result of his work at Johns Hopkins.
“I had worked with the Army on airborne infectious agents so I had a good basis for that type of work,” Christensen said. “When CDC needed people to go out in the field, they called and asked if I would go. I was on my way to Nigeria 24 hours later in an armored vehicle with a fully armed escort. It was definitely an interesting experience. After that I gained a lot of experience in that role so I’ve been taking that and applying it ever since.”
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest Ebola outbreak in history and the first in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where, as of Oct. 31, a total of 13,567 suspected or confirmed cases and 4,951 deaths have been reported. The disease is a rare and deadly affliction caused by infection that comes from bats which infect other animals which infect humans through direct contact. It presents unusual challenges in West Africa because of an overburdened public health and health care system, inefficient stakeholder utilization, porous borders and the stigma attached to it. The United States has reported four cases including one fatality.
Christensen’s assignment in Nigeria lasted a little over two weeks, but will continue to work on the Ebola outbreak through the end of January.
“I am in the process of transitioning positions at CDC to continue doing the work I am doing.”
Right now I am actually doing all domestic work but I am on the deployment list so if there is another case in the United States, I am out the door to respond to it,” he said.
The overall goals of the Ebola response are focused on patient care, stopping human to human transmission and community education.