U.S. boosts response to domestic Ebola
WASHINGTON — The federal government is stepping up its response to the Ebola crisis after a second Dallas nurse became ill and it was disclosed that she had been cleared to fly a day before her diagnosis.
While Ebola patients are not considered contagious until they have symptoms and only two persons have been known to contract the disease in the U.S., the revelations Wednesday raised alarms about whether hospitals and the public health system are equipped to handle the deadly disease.
Federal health officials were being called to testify before a congressional committee today to explain where things went wrong.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said nurse Amber Joy Vinson never should have been allowed to fly on a commercial jetliner because she had been exposed to the virus while caring for an Ebola patient who traveled to the U.S. from Liberia.
Vinson was being monitored closely since another nurse, Nina Pham, also involved in Thomas Eric Duncan’s care was diagnosed with Ebola. A CDC official cleared Vinson to board the Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland to the Dallas area. Her reported temperature, 99.5 degrees, was below the threshold set by the agency and she had no symptoms, according to agency spokesman David Daigle. Vinson was diagnosed with Ebola a day after the flight.
Frontier has taken the aircraft out of service. The plane was flown Wednesday without passengers from Cleveland to Denver, where the airline said it will undergo a fourth cleaning, including replacement of seat covers, carpeting and air filters.
Customs and health officials at airports in Chicago, Atlanta, the Washington suburbs and Newark, N.J., were scheduled today to start taking the temperatures of passengers from the three hardest-hit West African countries. The screenings, using no-touch thermometers, started Saturday at New York’s Kennedy International Airport.
Duncan, who traveled to the U.S. from Liberia, originally was sent home when he went to the Dallas hospital’s emergency room, only to return much sicker two days later. He died of Ebola on Oct. 8.
Frieden has said breaches of protocols led to the infection of the two nurses. More than 70 other health care workers involved in Duncan’s care were being monitored.
The oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee scheduled a hearing for today on Ebola with Frieden and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
In prepared testimony, Fauci said Duncan’s death and the infections of the two Dallas nurses and a nurse in Spain “intensify our concerns about this global health threat.” He said two Ebola vaccine candidates were undergoing a first phase of human clinical testing this fall. But he cautioned that scientists were still in the early stages of understanding how Ebola infection can be treated and prevented.
