Dr. Kent Brantly had been serving Ebola patients in Liberia with Samaritan's Purse, when he himself also contracted the virus and returned to the U.S. to receive treatment. After having fully recovered, he urged the public to not panic about the situation in the U.S., but instead, to focus efforts on West Africa.
Dr. Kent Brantly, who had contracted the Ebola virus but recovered after receiving treatment, assured the public to not panic about Ebola in the U.S., but to instead shift the focus to those who are suffering in West Africa.
Brantly, who had contracted the virus while he was serving as a missionary at Liberia with the ministry Samaritan’s Purse, spoke on Friday at a public forum at Abilene Christian University, his alma mater, about his experiences and thoughts about the Ebola outbreak.
“I just want to tell everyone that yes, Ebola is a serious, devastating disease; and for those number of people who have been identified as contacts of an Ebola patient, they need to be monitoring themselves, they need to be cooperating with the authorities, with the CDC, and it’s very serious for them. But for the rest of us, we don’t need to be worried,” he said.
“Our great, loving, compassionate God [is] calling us to love our neighbors,” pointing to the over 4,000 deaths that Ebola caused in West Africa.
“You’ve seen the reports from West Africa,” he said. “I assure you, the reality on the ground is worse. And our attention and our efforts need to be on loving the people there.”
“There has been a lot of panic, a lot of—I hesitate to use the word, hysteria—around the events in Dallas,” he mentioned.
“We don’t need to be worried that a plane flying over is going to somehow contaminate us with Ebola … We need to be putting that aside and try to love our neighbors. Our neighbors are the people in West Africa who are suffering far beyond what we can understand or fathom,” he explained.
He asked those who were present to take a part in helping to fight the outbreak by fundraising, being educated about the virus, and also sharing that knowledge with others.
Most importantly, he said, “I beg you, pray for the people of West Africa.”
