Malpractice and other insurance concerns could be dramatically higher for healthcare workers after a surgeon infected with Ebola died at a specialized biomedical unit in Nebraska today. Martin Salia, who had been working in a hospital in Sierra Leone, tested negative for the disease days after becoming ill.
After failing to improve, Salia was tested again on Nov. 10 and was rushed to Omaha Saturday after a positive diagnosis. He died 36 hours later, despite being placed on dialysis and receiving plasma from a surviving Ebola patient. His wife said that after testing negative for the virus, Salia believed he had contracted either malaria or typhoid. He paid for his own evacuation to the US.
Phil Smith, medical director of the biocontainment Unit at the Nebraska Medical Center said such “false negative” tests are possible in the first days of symptoms when evidence of the virus is still relatively low.
“It is with an extremely heavy heart that we share this news,” Smith said. “Dr. Salia was extremely critical when he arrived here, and unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to save him.”
Salia is the second person to die of Ebola in the US, and while he was tested for the virus overseas, the incident underscores the potential insurance implications of the growing Ebola threat.
Dr. Steven Weisbart, chief economist for the III, speculated that the impact on healthcare workers will cause the most significant changes to occur in the workers’ comp segment, though effects on other commercial insurance lines—including medical malpractice—are possible.
Considering the insurance landscape of the most heavily hit countries, however, impact may be minimal.
“It is unlikely that many workers in the main affected African countries have workers compensation-type coverages,” Weisbart said in October.
Ebola has killed more than 5,000 people in West Africa, primarily in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
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