News

HHS grad kept Ebola caregivers safe

Molly McKee Kellum, a 1994 graduate of Hendersonville High School, trained health care workers who deployed to West Africa in the Ebola epidemic.

By Bill Moss, Published: April 29, 2016

Molly McKee Kellum started out in college as an English major. Then a nonfiction thriller about dangerous contagions changed her path.

“I read Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone about an Ebola outbreak in the continental U.S. and always loved watching nature shows on TV,” she said, describing what led her to drop her English major. “I wanted to go into infectious disease research and public health.”
The daughter of Kevin McKee of Flat Rock and Beth Golden of Atlanta, Kellum was a key trainer in the real-life effort to combat the Ebola virus outbreak that spread across West Africa in 2014 and 2015.
Kellum attended Bruce Drysdale Elementary School, Hendersonville Middle School and Hendersonville High School, graduating in 1994.
“It’s where my heart is and the mountains are,” she says of the Hendersonville. “It’s my hometown.”
After dropping English at Belmont Abbey, she switched to a major in biology with a minor in economics.
“Once I decided that microbiology was really my passion I started applying to summer programs and internships,” she said in an interview from Atlanta, where she works for the education and training office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She landed an internship at the CDC the summer before her senior year. Her bosses must have liked her work. After she graduated, she accepted a fellowship in emerging and infectious disease. By 1999, she was working at the CDC fulltime. She earned her masters degree in public health through the University of South Florida. She’s married to Chris Kellum, who is also a 1994 graduate of Hendersonville High School.
After Sept. 11, she found herself at the microbiology center of the universe, working on the anthrax threat in the aftermath of the terror attack. “It was exciting and fun,” she says.
When the largest Ebola outbreak in history spread in West Africa in early 2014, Kellum knew that she and her agency would be called on.
“It was one of those things that for me personally that, I knew that in the past there have been outbreaks of Ebola and they were contained pretty effectively and pretty quickly,” she said. “Once I realized we were growing into a active health crisis I knew that engaging in that was sort of what we had prepared forever to do. This is what public health is all about it. Automatically, I wanted to be over there on the front lines. I talked to my husband and two sons and they said, ‘No way. You’re not going to the front lines, that’s not going to happen.’”

‘Who’s going to take care of the people?’

She did the next best thing. As it prepared to deploy medical personnel to help, the government needed a way to make sure the providers stayed healthy. If she couldn’t fly to West Africa, she would help however she could here. She volunteered to help train more than 590 staff members before they deployed to West Africa to fight the epidemic.
“A lot of the health care providers were becoming ill with Ebola,” Kellum said. “So you’ve got sick doctors, sick nurses and who’s going to take care of the people?”
The CDC created a training camp at a FEMA facility in Anniston, Ala., to teach medical workers how to protect themselves while they treated Ebola patients. From October 2014 to April 2015, Kellum worked at the mockup clinic.
“It was amazing because a lot of people came out of retirement,” she said. “We had missionaries. Despite the diverse backgrounds, everybody was there for this common goal. It it was inspiring to see, because they knew they were walking into a dangerous situation. We had a mockup Ebola unit. In a lot of the locations there’s no electricity or running water. We had to take them through the exercise of how to draw blood when you’re covered from head to toe when it’s 100 degrees outside. You’re fogging up and you’re trying to draw blood, doing something that would be easy breezy to do (in an American hospital). But in that protective suit it’s challenging.”
A lot of what Kellum’s team taught physicians, nurses and public health volunteers was counterintuitive.
“They would learn what to do if a mom came to the hospital with a sick infant,” Kellum said. “We were teaching them how to provide compassionate care without physical touching. Your instinct is to give them a hug, but physical touching — when you’re in a Ebola treatment clinic you can’t do that.”
Kellum was also part of a CDC team that created an online course on the techniques of staying safe while treating Ebola. It won a digital public health award last year.
Perhaps most rewarding for Kellum was that the training for the hot zone exposure worked.
“As far as I know the health care workers that we trained, thankfully none of them got Ebola,” she said.