West Coast hospitals on high alert for deadly diseases during World Cup as infections spike

There’s concern on the West Coast that infectious diseases such as Ebola could spread during the FIFA World Cup.

Games will draw travelers across the globe to Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco — bringing the potential for exotic diseases to come into the US.

Health experts in Seattle said they’ve been planning for more than a year for the games.

“There’s a lot of pieces to disaster preparedness, and I think we’re doing a fantastic job as an institution and as a system to prepare for all those possibilities,” Dr. John Lynch, an infectious disease specialist at UW Medicine, told KOMO News.

He says reports indicate nearly 1 million visitors will come to Seattle, challenging local health systems.

“That’s something we’ve never, ever dealt with before,” Lynch said. “And these folks are coming from all over the planet.”

Health experts are keeping an eye on which countries the teams will be coming from.

“We are looking at the countries of the teams that will be participating in FIFA at that time, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on the epidemiology and infectious disease activity in those places because those are the fans who are going to be coming here,” Lynch said.

Of particular concern is an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, which has resulted in nearly 900 infections.

Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House World Cup Task Force, told ABC News that he warned FIFA and the Congolese government about travel restrictions.

“We made clear to top FIFA officials and the Congo government that they need to maintain that bubble or risk not being able to travel to the U.S.,” Giuliani said.

Darcy Jaffe, senior vice president for clinical excellence at the Washington State Hospital Association, told KOMO News that she’s been preparing hospitals across Washington state.

“Luckily, the hospitals have a long track record of working closely with each other to coordinate across the bigger hospitals and the rural hospitals as well to make sure that we’re level-loading, that no one hospital gets in over their head, and that we are taking care of our community,” Jaffe said.

“We have good, smart people taking care of our patients who are ready and have experience with infectious disease, who know how to do travel screening, symptom screening, isolation, who to contact and what to do next,” she added.

No Ebola cases have been reported in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The agency says the “overall risk to the American public and travelers remains low.”

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