Why America's Ebola patients survive

Thousands are dying from the viral disease in Africa. Why are patients treated in the U.S. recovering?

U.S. hospitals
(Image credit: (Alex Wong/Getty Images))

What is Ebola's mortality rate?

It largely depends on where patients are treated. In the current outbreak in West Africa, about 70 percent of the 13,000 people infected have died. But of the nine confirmed cases in the U.S. — a mix of medical volunteers who returned from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and the health workers who caught the disease treating them here — there has been just one fatality: Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan. Eight patients were successfully treated and discharged, including Dr. Craig Spencer, who left Bellevue Hospital in New York City this week. Thus far, the mortality rate of Ebola patients treated in the U.S. is 11 percent, and it might be zero had Duncan's treatment not been delayed because of a misdiagnosis when he first went to the hospital in Dallas. An Ebola infection is "not a death sentence," says Michael Buchmeier, a virologist at the University of California at Irvine. "It's a beatable disease."

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