BRETT-MAJOR AND OTHERS BEING READY TO TREAT EVD Perspective Piece Being Ready to Treat Ebola Virus Disease Patients

Abstract. As the outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa continues, clinical preparedness is needed in countries at risk for EVD (e.g., United States) and more fully equipped and supported clinical teams in those countries with the epidemic spread of EVD in Africa. Clinical staff must approach the patient with a very deliberate focus on providing effective care while assuring personal safety. To do this, both individual health care providers and health systems must improve EVD care. Although formal guidance toward these goals exists from the World Health Organization, Medecin Sans Frontieres, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups, some of the most critical lessons come from personal experience. In this narrative, clinicians deployed by the World Health In order to provide our readers with timely access to new content, papers accepted by the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene are posted online ahead of print publication. Papers that have been accepted for publication are peer-reviewed and copy edited but do not incorporate all corrections or constitute the final versions that will appear in the Journal. Final, corrected papers will be published online concurrent with the release of the print issue. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The latest version is at http://ajtmh.org/cgi/doi/10.4269/ajtmh.14-0746 Accepted for Publication, Published online December 15, 2014; doi:10.4269/ajtmh.14-0746.