Doctor Diagnosed with Ebola Graduated from Michigan High School, Medical School

The latest U.S. Ebola patient is a Grosse Pointe North High School and Wayne State University School of Medicine graduate.

Dr. Craig Spencer, 33, tested positive for the often deadly virus that has claimed 4,800 lives in West Africa Thursday night, Garden City, NY, Patch reports. He recently returned from West Africa after working with Doctors Without Borders in the Ebola-stricken country of Guinea.

Kate Calabresa Murray, the principal at Grosse Pointe North High School, told the Detroit Free Press she wasn’t surprised Spencer was “serving selflessly in West Africa.”

The Free Press said Murray paused occasionally to maintain her composure when speaking of the alum, who has been gone from the school for 15 years, but is a local legend.

“He graduated in 1999, but everyone remembers him here because of his selfless leadership,” she said. “I don’t think Craig Spencer ever had a bad day at Grosse Pointe North.”

After attending Johns Hopkins University and studying Chinese language and literature at Henan University in China, he went to medical school at Wayne State, graduating in 2008. He also earned a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University, The Washington Post reports.

A spokesman for New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center, where Spencer is an emergency room doctor, said he had not seen any patients since his return to the United States a week ago. The hospital called him a “dedicated humanitarian” who “Went to an area of medical crisis to help a desperately underserved population.”

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• NYC Doctor Tests Positive for Ebola

Grosse Pointe North High School officials are discussing ways they can support Spencer and his family. “We’re sure that he’ll approach this challenge with the same energy and enthusiasm that he always shared in the halls of Grosse Pointe North High School,” she said.

Online, Spencer is being criticized on his public Facebook page by some people who think he put the public at risk by going about normal activities after he returned to the United States on Oct. 17. He passed two screenings at John F. Kennedy Airport before developing symptoms Thursday.

“How is it possible that educated medical professionals still don’t get this?” Michelle Zupko wondered, saying “they are the ones who know the drill” and the need to remain quarantined for 21 days.

“How are we supposed to control this vicious virus if our own doctors and nurses can’t follow protocol?” Zupko continued. “Get some damn common sense, book-smart people.”

Others called for calm and compassion.

Kerrigan Womack finds it “crazy that everyone seems to demonize” health-care workers who give selflessly of their time to “help sick people who can’t help themselves.”

“I don’t see any of you giving any donations to help the cause, but are the first to point the finger,” Womack wrote. “Thank you, Dr. Spencer, for being selfless and caring. That is what being a doctor is all about.”

Three other people have been diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. The first was Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who traveled from West Africa to Brussels before arriving in the United States in Dallas. He died Oct. 8 in a Texas hospital.

The two nurses who treated him were diagnosed with the virus. Nina Pham is being treated at a National Institutes of Health facility in Maryland, and Amber Vinson is being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Vinson’s family said Wednesday she is free of the virus, The Washington Post reports.

The newspaper said that five other Americans evacuated from West Africa have been treated for the Ebola virus and released from the Emory facility and University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Photo via Dr. Craig Spencer public Facebook page.

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