Research into proper training for healthcare workers to use personal protective equipment effectively is a top priority, as well as optimization of the PPE global supply chain so that equipment goes to the areas where it is most needed. Those were the messages of attendees at a workshop held Nov. 3 by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences auditorium in Washington, DC. The aim of the meeting was to develop a series of research questions that need to be pursued first. In another session, speakers addressed the need for healthcare workers in the Ebola epidemic and offered comments about how the United States is currently managing this effort. “Significantly, the number of healthcare workers [needed to fight the epidemic] is absolutely astonishing,” said UTMB’s James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory. “The healthcare infrastructure has been decimated [in West Africa,] and as a result, the international community's responsibility now is to provide the resources there. This feeds back, then, into our national strategy on how we manage returning volunteers. I think this is an important key to keep in mind: If you volunteer for a month overseas and then have to have three weeks on in quarantine, many people are going to be thinking twice about volunteering.”