Hospitals may refuse care

Officials from at least three hospital systems interviewed by Reuters say they are considering whether to withhold individual procedures or leave it up to individual doctors to determine whether interventions will be performed, while ethics experts are fielding calls from doctors asking what their professional obligations are to patients if healthcare workers could be at risk. One issue is that there are no data on whether an Ebola patient is beyond help, or whether procedures like dialysis or CPR can be performed safely and effectively. Medical historian Dr. Howard Markel:

This is another example of how this 21st century viral threat has pulled us back into the 19th century