LA County Health Department prepares for Ebola

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- How well is Los Angeles prepared for an outbreak of the Ebola virus? At a Tuesday hearing in front of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, public health officials said they are ready -- but it depends on whether or not people with symptoms come forward.

Public-health officials across the country and here in Los Angeles are taking steps to ensure the virus does not spread.

"I really would like to assure the residents that we are prepared and that they are safe," said L.A. County Dept. of Public Health Medical Director Jeffrey Gunzenhauser.

County health officials told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday that L.A. County can safely isolate and track any case of Ebola. It all depends, however, on people coming forward if they are ill or have concerns they were exposed.

Some worry that not everyone might come forward.

"We have an open border, we have millions of people who come here illegally, there's no health check, so we don't know what their condition is," said Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

"We really can't track all of the underground populations," said Gunzenhauser. "If they don't come forward -- let's say they wait a while and they become sick, eventually they're going to present for care somewhere, and that's when we would respond."

In Nebraska, American journalist Ashoka Mukpo and everyone around him are dressed in protective hazardous-materials outfits. And a Spanish nurse is now infected. The nurse, who had cared for a Spanish priest who died of Ebola, is the first case transmitted outside of West Africa. Officials here are looking at how that person got the disease.

"Because our primary focus should be that we're going to keep all of our healthcare workers safe and that was my focus when I was in Sierra Leone. If we don't have safe healthcare workers, we don't have healthcare workers that can take care of suspected cases or confirmed cases," said Dr. Suzanne Donovan, an infectious disease specialist at UCLA.

"One of the lessons we do know so far is that we have to be very careful not only in how we put on our protective equipment, but also in how we take it off," said Gunzenhauser. "And so folks double-glove, and there's a very specific procedure that people are being trained on now to assure that they don't have any exposure to the virus when they take off their gear."

County officials say they continue to learn about this illness from what is happening in other places. They insist they have all the safeguards in place. They just hope they'll never have to use them.