Texas Monitoring 80 People Connected to Ebola Patient
by VOA News October 02, 2014
Texas health officials are monitoring 80 people for possible exposure to Ebola, including up to 18 who had direct contact with a Liberian man who is the first patient in the U.S. to be diagnosed with the virus.
Erikka Neroes, a spokeswoman for the Dallas County health department, said none of those being monitored are showing symptoms of the disease, which include uncontrollable bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea.
The department has ordered the quarantine of four close family members of the Ebola patient, who has been identified as Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan.
Duncan was diagnosed with the Ebola virus on Sunday. He is in isolation at a Dallas hospital, where his condition is listed as serious but stable.
Public health authorities have been calling on U.S. health care workers to screen patients for signs of illness, question patients about their travel history and rule out Ebola for those who have been to West Africa, where more than 3,000 people have died in the epidemic.
"Unfortunately, that did not happen in this case," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "We just need to put that behind us and look ahead and make sure that in the future that doesn't happen again."
Duncan arrived in the United States on September 20, and five days later went to the hospital with a low-grade fever and abdominal pain.
A hospital official said the man told an emergency room nurse that he had come from Liberia, but that the information was not shared with all of his medical team.
The man from Liberia was sent home with antibiotics but returned two days later.
There is no specific treatment, but an American doctor diagnosed with the virus was found to be Ebola-free after taking an experimental drug in August.
Drug companies and international health organizations are rushing to bring promising vaccines to the trial stage.
'Defeating Ebola' conference
Also on Thursday, Britain made a plea for international help to deal with the world's worst Ebola outbreak at the start of a conference in London, with one charity warning that five people are being infected with the virus every hour in Sierra Leone.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called for 'decisive action' to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, urging countries to increase financial aid as well as provide other vital help including medical expertise, transport and supplies.
Hammond told the 'Defeating Ebola' conference Thursday in London that such action could save hundreds of thousands of lives and prevent the crisis from getting further out of control.
Ebola has killed at least 3,338 in West Africa - mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia - out of 7,178 cases as of September 28, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, and cases have been recorded elsewhere, including in the United States.
'Simply wrong'
Even with the rise in cases reported by WHO, Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said the Ebola crisis is stabilizing in her country and new data will soon prove that warnings from U.S. and U.N. experts of tens of thousands of cases were "simply wrong."
The comments, made to France 24's English news channel late on Wednesday, follow forecasts from the WHO that 20,000 people could be infected with Ebola by early November.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has warned of hundreds of thousands of cases if swift action is not taken.
"We are beginning to see a stabilization - even in Monrovia, which has been hit the hardest," Johnson Sirleaf said, referring to Liberia's capital city.
Liberia has recorded the most deaths - nearly 2,000 - and aid agencies say they still need hundreds of beds for Ebola patients in the capital.
The lack of beds means Ebola patients are being turned away and sent back to their communities, further spreading the infection.
However, Sirleaf rejected the negative warnings.
"I am waiting for the next projections and I hope they will admit that they've just been simply wrong, that all of our countries are getting this thing under control," she said.
Under-reporting suspected
Although WHO said the total number of new cases had fallen for a second week, it warned of under-reporting and said there were few signs of the epidemic being brought under control.
"Transmission remains persistent and widespread in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with strong evidence of increasing case incidence in several districts," the WHO said.
Britain and Sierra Leone arranged the event to spotlight the scale of the outbreak and ask for international support ahead of a donor conference planned for later this month.
Sierra Leone's President Ernest Bai Koroma, due to attend Thursday's conference, had to cancel because of technical problems with his plane.
Hammond said Britain has begun work on a 92-bed treatment center in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, as part of its pledge to add 700 new beds in the country.
Aid group Save the Children highlighted the lack of treatment capacity in Sierra Leone, saying treatment facilities there currently offer only 327 beds.
The latest WHO figures report 788 new cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone in the past three weeks.
Save the Children warned that even with the Britain's planned aid, more capacity will be needed to avoid having infected people staying at home and risking passing the virus on to their families.
Some material for this report came from Reuters.
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