Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC Studios in Toronto.

There's been quite a lot of concern and hysteria around fever and the return traveler, especially if they're from West Africa because of the recent Ebola scare.

It reminds me a little bit of 2003 with SARS in Toronto.

We had to contend with this serious airborne illness.

I'm here at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto with Dr. Howard Ovens, who's the chief of the emergency department here,

and a full professor at the University of Toronto. He's the central Toronto-Linn lead for EM as well as the provincial lead,

and he has a special interest in health policy. He's going to set us straight with what we need

to know about Ebola and the practicalities of how to handle the patient with a fever of unknown

origin in the

emergency department.

Dr. Ovens, welcome.

Hi, Anton. Thank you very much for the opportunity of talking to you today about Ebola

preparedness. I have a, I think, interesting perspective to offer

because I was an emergency physician and an emergency director during the SARS outbreak in 2003.

And during that time, I saw SARS patients personally and my department cared for over 20 SARS patients without any

transmission of disease.

And I think because of that experience, I look on the current Ebola situation a little

differently than many of my colleagues or some of the things I've read in the media.

So Dr. Evans, can you just tell us a little bit about how Ebola is different than SARS,

for example, and what are the facts we need to know about how it's transmitted?

I want to remind everybody that Ebola is a body fluid disease. It is not airborne.

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