I work in a pathology lab and we have been told that we are not allowed to wait the 6hrs for the ebola PCR testing to be performed to know if the patient has ebola and we must proceed with routine testing ie full blood count and biochemical tests immediately.
What concerns me is that ebola symptoms and malaria symptoms are similiar, so if a patient comes into the emergency department with fever, a malarial parasite screen will be requested at the same time. But rather than wait for the pcr testing, they would rather put staff at risk doing malaria films. This requires open samples, about 8 drops of blood heat fixed onto glass slides. It is a relatively large amount of blood required in terms of what is generally used for blood analysis.
6 hours is not a lot of time to wait to prevent further potential spread of the virus.
