New Ebola test determines if people with symptoms have potential to carry virus

A doctor from Rhode Island Hospital has come up with a diagnostic tool for Ebola virus, which will determine the likelihood that patients presenting with Ebola symptoms will actually carry the virus.

Adam C. Levine, M.D., who treated Ebola-infected patients in Liberia last year, used his field experience to create for the very first time, clinical prediction model, the Ebola Prediction Score, for patients with suspected EVD who await laboratory confirmation.

Levine said that the Ebola Prediction Score would help clinicians risk-stratify patients already meeting one or more suspect definitions of EVD.

Typical predictors for EVD include fever, nausea/vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, abdominal pain, loss of appetite, muscle pain, joint pain, headache, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, hiccups, unexplained bleeding, and exposure to a suspected or confirmed EVD patient within 21 days. In Levine's Ebola Prediction Score tool, six of those symptoms create the model-sick contact, diarrhea, loss of appetite, muscle pain, difficulty swallowing and absence of abdominal pain. A scoring system based on these signs may help clinicians determine who is most likely to require isolation while laboratory tests confirm diagnosis.

Levine said that by admitting a patient to an ETU who is unlikely to have EVD puts that patient at risk for exposure, and hence determining which patients to admit for definitive testing and treatment required balancing the epidemiologic imperative to break the train of transmission in the community against the ethical imperative to "do no harm" to each individual patient.

The research was published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine today.