US monitors 80 people who came into contact with Ebola patient
Man diagnosed with the deadly, infectious virus took three flights on two airlines over 28 hours
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 02 October, 2014, 10:01pm
UPDATED : Friday, 03 October, 2014, 12:36am
Associated Press
Dr. Anthony Fauci said that even though Eric Duncan took several flights to reach the US, his lack of symptoms at the time made it "extraordinarily unlikely" that he infected anyone on the planes. Photo: AP
About 80 people are being monitored for symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus in Texas, a Dallas County Health and Human Services spokeswoman has said.
Health officials are focusing on containment to try to stem the possibility of the Ebola virus spreading beyond Thomas Eric Duncan, who had travelled on three flights over 28 hours from Liberia to Dallas to visit relatives and fell ill on September 24.
Those being monitored are the 12 to 18 people who first came into contact with the patient, who was identified by his sister, Mai Wureh.
Federal health officials say they include three members of the ambulance crew that took the man to the hospital, plus a handful of schoolchildren - as well as others those initial people had contact with.
"The number of people who are now part of the contact investigation has grown to more than 80," spokeswoman Erikka Neroes said yesterday.
Neroes was unable to specify how those initial 12 to 18 people came in contact with the larger group, nor could she provide specifics about the ages of those being monitored.
No one was showing symptoms, she said, and health officials have told them to monitor their own conditions in the coming weeks.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said yesterday it had a list of about 100 potential or possible contacts, but that the official "contact-tracing number will be lower," department spokeswoman Carrie Williams said.
A Dallas emergency room sent Duncan home last week, even though he told a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa.
The decision by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to release Duncan could have put others at risk of exposure to Ebola before the man went back to the ER a couple of days later when his condition worsened.
"That's how we're going to break the chain of transmission, and that's where our focus has to be," Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Wednesday. The patient explained to a nurse last Thursday that he was visiting the United States from Africa, but that information was not widely shared, said Dr Mark Lester, who works for the hospital's parent company.
Hospital epidemiologist Dr Edward Goodman said the patient had a fever and abdominal pain during his first ER visit, not the riskier symptoms of vomiting and diarrhoea. Duncan was diagnosed with a low-risk infection and sent home, Lester said.
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital is reviewing how the situation would have been handled if all staff had been aware of the man's circumstances.
David Wright, regional director of the US Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services, would not say if the hospital was under investigation.
Duncan has been kept in isolation at the hospital since Sunday. He was reportedly in serious but stable condition.
Since the Ebola outbreak was first reported in the forest region of Guinea in March, the haemorrhagic fever has killed 3,338 people. It crossed into Liberia and Sierra Leone and has triggered smaller outbreaks and cases in Nigeria and Senegal.
Britain yesterday asked for foreign help to battle the virus in its former colony of Sierra Leone, as a charity warned that five people were infected every hour in the west African nation.
The plea was made at a London conference of ministers, diplomats and health officials from around 20 countries and world organisations.
"The UK is leading and coordinating the response in Sierra Leone, but we need international help," British foreign minister Philip Hammond said.
The Save the Children charity urged international action to combat a "terrifying" rate of infection in Sierra Leone.
"The scale of the Ebola epidemic is devastating and growing every day, with five people infected every hour in Sierra Leone last week," chief executive Justin Forsyth said.
"We need a coordinated international response."
Additional reporting by Reuters
