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Ebola-stricken doc was a do-gooder

Slim likelihood he spread the virus
From left, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, wife Chirlane McCray and New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett engage with co-owner Daniel Holzman at The Meatball Shop in New York on Saturday, where Dr. Craig Spencer, an Ebola patient, ate just before he became ill. Spencer remained in stable condition while isolated in a hospital, talking by cellphone to his family and assisting disease detectives who are accounting for his every movement since arriving in New York from Guinea via Europe on Oct. 17.

NEW YORK – Dr. Craig Spencer, the physician now being treated for Ebola in New York City, is the kind of globe-trotting do-gooder who could walk into a small village in Africa and, even though he didn’t know the language, win people over through hugs alone, according to people who worked with him.

Even before leaving for Guinea this summer to fight Ebola with Doctors Without Borders, he had amassed an ordinary man’s lifetime worth of world travel, much of which was in the service of the poor.

In the past three years alone, Spencer, an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, had been to Rwanda to work on an emergency care teaching curriculum, volunteered at a health clinic in Burundi, helped investigate an infectious parasitic disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo and traveled to 32 villages in Indonesia to do a public health survey.

“He was never afraid of getting his hands dirty or his feet dirty,” said Dr. Deogratias Niyizonkiza, founder of Village Health Works, the aid group that brought him to Burundi for four months in 2012.

“He went into this environment, a country that is truly off the mark, without knowing the language, and he would make everyone feel so comfortable. It’s really a daunting task and yet he helped the people immensely,” Niyizonkiza said. “He talked to everyone, including the people working in the lab ... Their language was just to hug each other and smile.”

In between it all, Spencer ran the ING New York City Marathon in 2013, finishing with a respectable amateur time of 3 hours, 43 minutes.

Ebola survivor Ashoka Mukpo, who was successfully treated in the U.S. after contracting the virus when working in Liberia as a freelance cameraman for NBC, said Saturday that Spencer is a hero.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Mukpo took issue with those who would criticize the doctor for going out in public after returning from West Africa and said there’s no evidence Spencer exposed anyone in New York to any risk.

“Dr. Spencer risked his life to treat and lend a hand to people who have very little ability to take care of this problem themselves,” Mukpo said from his family’s home in Rhode Island. “Before we look at what the implications are of what this case are, I think we need to honor what he did in West Africa and give him the respect he deserves.”

Spencer was hospitalized at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Center on Thursday, six days after returning from Guinea. Health officials said he began feeling tired on Tuesday, spent a day out in the city on Wednesday, and then alerted authorities when he developed a fever Thursday morning.

Experts have repeatedly assured the public that there is little chance that Spencer spread the virus before developing symptoms, but his case prompted the governors of New York, New Jersey and Illinois on Friday to order a mandatory quarantine for any arriving international travelers who had contact with Ebola patients in three West African countries.



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