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UM Prof Rebukes WSU Med School Grad for 'Decision to Break His Self-Quarantine'

October 24, 2014, 4:16 PM by  Alan Stamm

A University of Michigan medical professor posts blunt words about a 33-year-old fellow physician -- Craig Spencer, a Wayne State alumnus diagnosed with Ebola in New York City.  

Dr. Spencer committed an "egregious violation of voluntary self-quarantine," in the view of Dr. Howard Markel, a prominent professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases. His frank criticism comes in a commentary he wrote for New Republic magazine.  

The New York patient, who grew up in Grosse Pointe Woods, was diagnosed late Thursday -- six days after returning to his Manhattan apartment on West 147th Street from Guinea, a West African nation where he treated Ebola patients as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders.


Dr. Craig Spencer, who's engaged to marry next Sept. 5, grew up in Grosse Pointe Woods and graduated from Grosse Pointe North (Class of '99). (Facebook photo)

The UM specialist argues that the young emergency medicine doctor, a 1999 graduate of Grosse Pointe North High School and WSU's School of Medicine in 2008, should have heeded advice to avoid public contact for three weeks.     

Astoundingly, the night before [Wednesday], he boarded a subway bound for Brooklyn, bowled ten frames with his friends and returned to his apartment in Harlem that evening by taxi.

The following morning, he developed a fever of 100.3 degrees and, shortly thereafter, found himself in the isolation unit at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center.

Voluntary quarantine, staying at home, avoiding contact with others, self-monitoring one’s temperature and any new symptoms are not difficult concepts to understand. It may be lonely, boring or even frightening to follow such edicts. Yet one would assume that if anyone would follow these public health rules to the letter, it would be a physician.

Sadly, that old adage, “doctors make the worst patients,” seems to ring especially true when considering Dr. Spencer’s decision to break his self-quarantine and go out for the evening.

The Ann Arbor and New York physicians don't know each other While writing that he is "in no position to condemn or reprimand him," Dr. Markel adds pointedly:

The question that is keeping me awake Thursday night is not the fear that Ebola will overtake New York City (it won’t) but, instead, what is it about Dr. Spencer's psyche that would facilitate taking such a risk to oneself and to others? . . .

He might have just been bored. He might have just not been thinking at all about the potential risks to himself or others. But if he is like me when I was a bold, young physician out to conquer illness as if I were a soldier in a good war, I bet he just thought Ebola could not happen to him.


Update -- Facebook comments by two of our readers/ (Another local acquaintance comments under the article.)

• "I knew Craig when he was an undergrad, and I don't believe he'd risk anyone's health." -- Heather Muir of Grand Haven, originally from Grosse Pointe Park

• "I graduated from high school with him, and while I didn't know him that well, he was not the type of person to knowingly cause harm to others." -- Christopher Profeta, Grosse Pointe Woods


Read more:  New Republic


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