Scientists at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, prepare an experimental Ebola vaccine for shipment to the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva. Photo: Reuters

A young woman complaining of abdominal pain and nausea who had travelled to Africa arrived at a Long Island hospital fearful that she had contracted Ebola. She did not have the virus, but the pregnancy test was positive.

The woman had been to South Africa, more than 5,400 kilometres from the three West African countries enduring the worst Ebola outbreak on record, and the trip ended six weeks prior, or twice the potential incubation period for Ebola infection.

“It tells you how ready for panic we can get ourselves,” said Dr Bruce Hirsch, an infectious diseases specialist at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York.

“There’s a lot of anxiety and the answer to anxiety is information and training.”

The woman’s fear was emblematic of panic across the country since Liberian traveler Thomas Eric Duncan became the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States on September 30.

Two of the nurses who treated him at a Dallas, Texas hospital have since become infected, and several hundred more potential contacts, both direct and indirect, have been tracked.

Already dozens of false Ebola scares have been reported by hospitals even though the virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person and the virus is not airborne.

With the annual flu season looming, hospitals and doctors are preparing themselves for emergency rooms that may become flooded with patients who fear Ebola but instead have influenza, which can cause similar symptoms in the early stages such as fever and body aches.

You’re far more likely to die at this point from not receiving a flu shot

But fear often trumps common sense, even though people should be far more worried about the flu given the toll it is known to take every year, doctors said.

“You’re far more likely to die at this point from not receiving a flu shot,” said Dr. Sampson Davis, an emergency medicine physician at Meadowlands Hospital Center in Secaucus, New Jersey.

The severity of the flu season, which varies from year to year, and any spread of Ebola in the US, will be critical factors in how strained hospital resources may become. And while there are tests for influenza and screening protocols being put in place for Ebola, hospitals could also face patients with all sorts of ailments looking to allay misplaced fears.

“I think there will be an increase of people who want to get checked out just because of the fear factor, especially if we start to see more of a spread of Ebola,” Davis said.

Flu season typically begins in November and peaks in January or February. More than 200,000 people are hospitalised on average for flu-related complications each year, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile an experimental Ebola vaccine is being prepared with a possible target date being next December.

Annual US flu deaths have ranged as low as 3,000 and as high as 49,000. Public health officials said many hospitals are implementing protocols that limit Ebola testing to people who had direct contact with the disease and recent travellers to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.