Disease

dfw.cbslocal.com - October 14, 2014

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Two weeks after the first Ebola diagnosis on American soil, the Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden says the organization should have sent a larger response team to insure the virus did not spread to anyone else.

Learning from past mistakes, the CDC has now established an “Ebola response team” that will travel to any place where Ebola is diagnosed, should there be another case identified in the country.  Such a team is now on the ground in Dallas, said Frieden.

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Environmental-Cleaning Guys sprayed disinfectant Sunday outside the apartment complex on Marquita Street where the nurse who contracted Ebola lives. The hospital parking lot she uses and her car were also decontaminated, officials said.  Jim Tuttle/Staff Photographer

dallasnews.com - by Jeffrey Weiss - October 14, 2014

Ebola care instructions at a Dallas hospital and across the country were changed by federal officials on Monday — a tacit admission that training and procedures used for America’s first case of the disease had come up short.

The changes were prompted by the discovery that a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas had become infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in the hospital last Wednesday.

The transmission of the deadly virus to the nurse “doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely. But it does change substantially how we approach it,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable.”

WASHINGTON POST

By Todd C. Frankel                         October 14

....The Dallas nurse, 26-year old Nina Pham,who helped treat Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was the first person diagnosed with the dreaded disease in the United States became the first – and so far only – person infected by Duncan. In the wake of her infection, U.S. health officials have pledged to review how future Ebola cases are handled.

But the case is also noteworthy for another, potentially positive reason: Nearly 50 people were exposed to Ebola before the nurse, and none of them has been diagnosed with the disease.

This group of neighbors, family members and first responders are being watched carefully by health authorities. They had some degree of close contact with Duncan during the four-day period when he was contagious – from when he started showing Ebola symptoms on Sept. 24 to when the hospital finally admitted him on Sept. 28. They didn’t take any Ebola-specific precautions. They didn’t know he was infected.... Yet, so far, they have not gotten sick. And their 21-day Ebola incubation period started before Pham’s.

An Ebola health worker is decontaminated at a Médecins sans Frontières unit in Monrovia in Liberia.
Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images

theguardian.com - by Bridget Mulrooney, Sue Ellen Kovack and Anine Kongelf - October 13, 2014

Bridget Mulrooney, 36
American nurse working for the International Medical Corps in Bong County, Liberia

I was working as a travel nurse at a children’s hospital in California when I got an email from International Medical Corps asking if I was interested in deploying to Liberia to help fight Ebola. I wanted to go immediately but I was locked into a contract at the time. The more I heard, the more excited I got.

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