Australia cannot be protected from Ebola by isolating itself, a West Australian scientist has warned ahead of his journey to west Africa to combat the outbreak of the virus.
Tim Inglis, a medical microbiologist at the University of WA, says the debate about how to respond to the virus is being undermined by media hype and political panic.
"When science is lacking, the default response to infectious disease is often fear," Dr Inglis wrote in an article published in Nature.
The federal government has so far refused to send help, citing the lack of evacuation processes to ensure the safe return of infected Australians.
But Dr Inglis says if Ebola is brought home by health workers, it can be managed and is an acceptable price to pay for combating the disease at its source.
"The real issue is that the threat to Australia, the United States and other developed countries will be much higher in six months," he said.
"The best defence is to act now and in Africa."
Dr Inglis and his team will test their mobile laboratory in northern WA before travelling to the fringes of the worst-affected region of west Africa by the end of the year to assist efforts to diagnose the disease.
He said testing at the edge of the outbreak zone would take diagnosis to where patients were likely to become infected next, rather than sending people or blood samples to where the disease was concentrated.
Jennifer Todd, a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong, said scientists and healthcare workers should be praised for going into the zone, rather than being criticised.
"These people are quite aware of the risks they are taking and the potential for infection, however they go hoping to stop the slow march in advancing cases," she said.
Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases physician at the Australian National University Medical School, says Ebola is not easy to contract.
A study examining household contacts of Ebola patients during an earlier outbreak found that only about one in six became unwell, which was low compared to an infection like measles, she said.
But Nikolai Petrovsky, the director of endocrinology at the Flinders University School of Medicine, is less convinced that sending scientists to the frontline will help.
Professor Petrovsky said efforts should be directed at developing successful vaccines.
"If current public health efforts to quarantine and prevent further transmission fail over the next few months, then only an effective prophylactic vaccine is going to prevent a major humanitarian crisis evolving in west Africa over the next year," he said.
Unlike influenza, Ebola was a relatively stable genome that was not evolving rapidly or becoming more transmissible, although that was still possible in the future, he said.
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