Kalispell Regional Medical Center is taking precautions for highly infectious diseases such as Ebola and the hospital is reaching out to its staff and the public to educate as well as prepare.

Dr. Jeffrey Tjaden, an infectious disease expert in Kalispell, has been giving lectures and presentations to KRMC doctors all week to help them answer questions patients might have.

This is on top of an Ebola Response Team formed at the hospital, composed of doctors and nurses specially trained to deal with the disease and in the use and removal of personal protective equipment.

“It’s a gamut of health-care workers with additional training,” Tjaden said in one of his lectures Thursday.

If a person exhibiting flu-like symptoms who had been to Sierra Leone, Guinea or Liberia or had been in contact with a symptomatic Ebola patient were to come to Kalispell, he or she would be whisked away to a negative pressure room in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

These rooms suck in all airborne infectious material, preventing it from leaving. For Ebola, which is only transmitted by infected bodily fluids, this negative pressure room would be ideal because it also has an anteroom where health-care providers could don and remove personal protective clothing.

Joe Russell, the Flathead City-County Public Health Officer, said equipment hospitals already have in stock would be adequate for protection: A hooded protective suit, gloves, face shield and respirator. Tjaden said as long as there is no skin showing, the suit would be fine as long as it was removed methodically.

It is speculated that some of the Ebola-infected health-care workers in Dallas removed equipment improperly, leading to infection.

Tjaden also stressed the difference between certain words he claims the media uses interchangeably. An “infected” person has Ebola and is symptomatic. A “contact” or “exposed” person has been near enough to possibly get the virus from an infected person.

The 2014 outbreak — largely based in the three African countries mentioned above, as well as Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States — has infected almost 10,000 people and killed almost 5,000 people.

Ebola is a hemorrhagic virus, closely related to Marburg, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and other tropical diseases. It causes an abrupt fever in 97 percent of cases and shuts down the immune system. Many deaths from Ebola actually come from opportunistic bacterial infections.

For these reasons, treatment consists of rehydration, malarial and antibiotic treatments to try and treat the symptoms. The hope is the body will be strong enough to survive even a hot biological agent such as Ebola, since there is no vaccine or cure.

The disease was first diagnosed in 1976, and has been centralized in Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). This outbreak in West Africa is thousands of miles away, leaving some health officials nervous.

The World Health Organization conservatively estimated that 500,000 could be infected by January if the disease spread unchecked. High estimates leaned toward 1.4 million.

But Nigeria and Senegal have been declared Ebola-free and Spain and the United States have kept their infections minimal.

In Kalispell, not far from one of four hospitals in the nation capable of completely containing an Ebola case (St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula), a large collaboration between agencies has taken place to ensure the Flathead wouldn’t be a hot zone.

KRMC, along with North Valley Hospital, the Flathead City-County Health Department, Emergency Medical Services and the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, have come together to troubleshoot a mock infection.

Tjaden didn’t downplay the significance of the disease, but did offer reassurances to the health-care workers at his lecture that the Flathead is preparing for anything.