Nurse says battling Ebola outbreak is 'best job in the world'

SEATTLE – Karin Huster encounters death up close, and repeatedly.

She has seen babies perish in their mothers' arms. She has watched people grieve as their loved ones were buried in white body bags drenched in bleach. She has survived a clinic where she worked being attacked, burned and shot at.

"It's the best job in the world," she says. "And I don't mean this lightly."

As a nurse and field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, and previously with other organizations, Huster spends six to 12 weeks at a time away from her Seattle home, helping some of the world's most vulnerable people. Most recently, she has been in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Ebola has killed 2,006 people and sickened 2,899 since 2018.

The Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976 in the DRC, then known as Zaire. Death from the virus, which is passed through bodily fluids, is excruciating. Victims often die from dehydration because of severe diarrhea and vomiting. Entire families can be ravaged by the disease after caring for each other at home.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency in 2019, while Huster was on her fourth trip to the central African nation.

While such declarations don't always stir her neighbors to action, Huster says Americans should pay attention to Ebola outbreaks in distant lands.

She points to migrants fleeing Central America for the United States, or areas of extreme poverty in Appalachia, where she has done some volunteer work. Suffering doesn't respect borders, she says.

Still, when Huster is home, she doesn't talk much about what she's seen or been through, or the mental toll it takes. It's hard to process it with people who are living comfortably in Seattle.

"Even my husband, he even knows better now than to ask," she said. "You are sort of isolated."

Huster has yet to use the mental-health services Doctors Without Borders provides. Her main outlet has been writing op-eds in newspapers and medical journals.

In a 2014 Seattle Times op-ed, she addressed the fear that gripped the U.S. after a man with Ebola traveled from West Africa to Texas, where he died. The panicked rhetoric and policy decisions that followed, she argued, discouraged American health workers from traveling to help stem the outbreak — ironically making it more likely the virus would spread across the globe.

Her Dutch mother and French father bought a black-and-white television and would only let her and her brother watch the news. It was the late 1960s, and the Nigerian-Biafran War was raging. Huster recalls seeing "people dying of starvation and this group of doctors that were coming to help, and [thinking], 'Ah, that's what I want to do.' "

In 1991, Huster moved to Seattle for a job with Microsoft translating Word into French. There, she met her husband, Frank, who was translating Excel into French. They had two children, and she settled into a stable life in her adopted home.

But those childhood dreams began to gnaw at her.

She quit Microsoft, enrolled in the University of Washington's nursing school, and spent eight years as a nurse in the intensive-care unit at Harborview Medical Center before going back to UW for a master's degree in global health.

While in school in 2012, Huster went to Lebanon to work with Syrian refugees. Two years later, she joined a group called Partners in Health in the fight against the world's largest known Ebola outbreak, which was sweeping through West Africa and ultimately killed 11,325 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

"There is a remarkable theme that aligns all of her work in that she is the first person to follow her mission, her passion, to help people in emergency settings," said Stephen Gloyd, who has directed the master's program in the UW's Department of Global Health since 1988.

Huster's third deployment to the DRC, in May, ended abruptly after a new Ebola clinic was burned and, two days later, a group of men rammed a car through a barrier and began shooting at the temporary treatment center.

The people in this region, which borders Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan, have an understandable deep-rooted mistrust of the central government and question the massive response to Ebola when compared to other persistent health problems, Huster said.

"People are angry," she said. "They say to you, 'You don't care about us for 30 years, 40 years, and now all of a sudden, you care about us because it's Ebola, but what about my kid who just died of malaria?' "

Public-health workers in West Africa found it effective to take into account the worries and concerns of the local population as a way to treat Ebola more broadly. This holistic approach has been slow coming in the DRC, Huster said.

An even greater sense of urgency has come to the fight as Ebola has spread from North Kivu to two neighboring provinces, and a Congolese girl who traveled to Uganda was found to have the virus.

But there have also been some positive developments lately. A second vaccine is having promising results, and two of four treatments being field-tested have health care workers feeling optimistic.

Huster has returned home for a month or two before returning to her mission.

"My goal in life is nothing else but to try to improve people's lives," she said. "I'm not in there for the money, you know. If I were, then I'd still be at Microsoft."