Ebola Tag

The New York Times and CBS have both confirmed that Dr. Craig Spencer has tested positive for Ebola:

“Today, EMS HAZ TAC Units transferred to Bellevue Hospital a patient who presented a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms,” New York City officials said in a statement. “The patient is a health care worker who returned to the U.S. within the past 21 days from one of the three countries currently facing the outbreak of this virus.” Spencer, who is a physician in his 30s and works with Doctors Without Borders, came back a week ago from Guinea, where he is believed to have been treating Ebola patients. “A person in New York City, who recently worked with Doctors Without Borders in one of the Ebola-affected countries in West Africa, notified our office this morning to report having developed a fever,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement. “As per the specific guidelines that Doctors Without Borders provides its staff on their return from Ebola assignments, the individual engaged in regular health monitoring and reported this development immediately. While at this stage there is no confirmation that the individual has contracted Ebola, Doctors Without Borders, in the interest of public safety and in accordance with its protocols, immediately notified the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, which is directly managing the individual’s care.”

Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo are scheduled to hold a news conference from Bellevue Hospital at approximately 9 p.m. (Embedded below the fold.)

(UPDATE: Officials have confirmed a diagnosis of Ebola. See our updated post here. A physician who recently returned from a Doctors Without Borders mission to West Africa is in isolation at New York's Bellevue Hospital after presenting with a 103 degree fever. Here we go again. NBC News reports:

"While at this stage there is no confirmation that the individual has contracted Ebola, Doctors Without Borders, in the interest of public safety and in accordance with its protocols, immediately notified the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, which is directly managing the individual’s care," Doctors Without Borders said in a statement. Health care workers are among those at highest risk of being infected, because they work so closely with very ill patients and are in frequent contact with infectious bodily fluids such as vomit. “The patient was transported by a specially trained HAZ TAC unit wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE),” the city health department said in a statement, adding that after consultation with the hospital and the CDC, they would test for Ebola. They are also checking him for malaria, salmonella and stomach viruses because they can all cause similar symptoms.

Dr. Craig Spencer, the latest patient, had been monitoring himself since his return, and thankfully did the right thing by reporting his fever to the appropriate officials. Reports haven't revealed where Dr. Spencer was practicing, but if he was in a country that was placed under recently-implemented travel restrictions, the next few weeks could be...interesting...for elected officials:

Some good news related to Ebola: The nurse who flew to Ohio while ill with an Ebola infection has been declared free of the virus.

Dallas nurse Amber Vinson is free of the Ebola virus and will be transferred from isolation at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, her family said Wednesday. The family also said that the 29-year-old nurse, who contracted the virus from Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, was regaining strength and that her spirits were high. "We are overjoyed to announce that, as of yesterday evening, officials at Emory University Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control (and Prevention) are no longer able to detect virus in her body," the family said in a statement hours after Vinson spoke with her mother, Debra Berry.

And as the 21-day quarantine ends for the family of the late Thomas Duncan and the healthcare professionals who cared for him during his fatal bout, new questions are being asked about the time period of isolation itself.

As the 48 patients exposed to the first U.S. Ebola patient near the end of their 21-day incubation period on Sunday, Oct. 19, a new study is questioning whether that period is sufficient to keep the public safe. "Twenty-one days has been regarded as the appropriate quarantine period for holding individuals potentially exposed to Ebola Virus to reduce risk of contagion, but there does not appear to be a systemic discussion of the basis for this period," lead researcher Charles Haas, an environmental engineering professor at Drexel University, wrote in the study paper.

In the meantime, it is heartening to learn that nobody else has succumbed to hemorrhagic fever as a result of Duncan's actions.

Today DHS imposed a set of travel restrictions that will funnel all travelers coming from countries suffering from Ebola outbreaks through 5 major airports in the U.S. Although these restrictions will not close off ports of entry to these travelers, they will force all travelers coming from those West African countries to submit to both an interview and temperature checks at Washington Dulles International Airport, Chicago O'Hare International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, or Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The White House is confident that these measures will help "ensure the safety and security of the American public." Via The Hill:

"This is a situation where the DHS had to work with the airlines that are flying passengers from a wide variety of countries from Europe to the United States. It did require some work with the State Department to inform other countries. So there’s a lot of coordination that had to go into developing and implementing this policy." The White House said it remains opposed to a flight ban, which the president and health officials argue would be counterproductive. "The fact of the matter is giving individuals an incentive to conceal their travel history only puts the American public at risk. ... It makes it harder for us to determine which individuals need to be subjected to the screening that we’ve described," Earnest said.

Who knew this hotel chain was prophetic?...

Hey, that'll work:

President Obama has asked Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, as his Ebola response coordinator, according to a White House official. "He will report directly to the president’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and the president's national security adviser, Susan Rice, as he ensures that efforts to protect the American people by detecting, isolating and treating Ebola patients in this country are properly integrated but don’t distract from the aggressive commitment to stopping Ebola at the source in West Africa," a White House official wrote in an e-mail. Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, served as Biden's chief of staff from 2009 to 2011 and as Gore's from 1995 to 1999. He helped oversee the Democratic side in the 2000 presidential election recount as its lead lawyer, a role that Kevin Spacey portrayed in the HBO film "Recount."

Klain has virtually no experience except for the political and the legal. He's another Harvard Law graduate, and briefly clerked for SCOTUS Justice Byron White, but after that there's mostly a long string of Democratic political positions, including a stint as debate prepper. The following [emphasis mine] is really a masterpiece in gracefully laconic understatement by the WaPo. My hat is off to the article's authors:

S--t just got real.

Breaking: Obama signs executive order authorizing DOD to call up selected reserve and ready reserve for Ebola response

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) October 16, 2014

The call up will assist the military force fighting Ebola as part of Operation United Assistance. The Executive Order appears to be part of sending the National Guard to Liberia. Here's the Order, via Zeke Miller: Here's the key portion of the Order:

A press release issued today by the Texas Department of State Health Services:

Second Health Care Worker Tests Positive for Ebola News Release Oct. 15, 2014 A second health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who provided care for the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States has tested positive for the disease. The health care worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at the hospital. Health officials have interviewed the latest patient to quickly identify any contacts or potential exposures, and those people will be monitored. The type of monitoring depends on the nature of their interactions and the potential they were exposed to the virus. The worker was among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan after he was diagnosed with Ebola. The preliminary Ebola test was run late Tuesday at the state public health laboratory in Austin, and results were received at about midnight. Confirmatory testing on a separate specimen will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Ebola is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids of a sick person or exposure to contaminated objects such as needles. People are not contagious before symptoms such as fever develop.

Officials continue to suggest worker error, something the nurses union denies, via CNN:

I was talking with biologists yesterday, as part of a work project, and we all were becoming increasingly alarmed at the bureaucratic response to the reports that nurses in Dallas and Spain were stricken with Ebola. I stated that the "tipping point" would be reached if one of the nurses spread the disease to someone else outside of the hospital setting. Presently, 76 Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital workers being monitored for potential infection with Ebola. Once someone outside the healthcare setting was infected, then the chances of this being a more serious health threat to the nation escalate. We are coming perilously close to the tipping point, as it looks like an Alcon employee who is "closely associated" with the Dallas nurse, Nina Pham, is in isolation and under observation to determine if he displays "Ebola symptoms". The CBS Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate offers a video report and post.

Dallas nurse Nina Pham tested positive for the Ebola virus over the weekend. Pham was one of the medical workers who administered treatment to Ebola patient Thomas Duncan, who died from the virus last week. Pham first noticed that she had some of the symptoms on Friday, and her diagnosis was confirmed on Sunday.

What the first cases transmitted in the west might be telling us...

As the news of the first Ebola case contracted within the country rivets the nation, Enterovirus-D68 continues infecting our children. Now it has claimed the life of a Michigan toddler:

A Michigan toddler has died of enterovirus D68, another reminder of the deadly potential of a disease that has infected hundreds nationwide in two months. Madeline Reid died at Children's Hospital of Michigan, where she had been transferred "for advanced services," according to the Detroit hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Rudolph Valentini. "The CDC confirmed EV-D68 after her arrival here, and she subsequently succumbed to her illness," Valentini said.

News 8 Wood TV files this video report on Madeline's death. A little closer to my home, there has been a jump in the number of cases recorded.

California health officials Friday said they've now identified 32 cases of enterovirus D-68 statewide, a number that's jumped quickly in recent days. In Southern California, four cases were in L.A. County, three in Orange County and one in Ventura County, according to the California Department of Public Health. All 32 patients were identified as children ranging in age from a week old to 15 years old.

Spain's Ebola patient zero is a nurse's assistant. No one can say she kept mum about the fact that she'd been near an Ebola patient recently. Authorities were well aware of her exposure, because she was on the team that cared for a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom were shipped back to Spain after they contracted Ebola in Africa. Both of them have died. But although health workers in Dallas did not originally know that America's patient zero, Thomas Duncan, had been recently exposed to Ebola, there is a similarity between the unnamed nurse's disease trajectory and that of Duncan. As with him, there also was a delay in her hospitalization and diagnosis. She is said to have reported her first symptom, a fever, on September 30, and yet she was only hospitalized this week. Since authorities knew in advance that she'd been exposed, why the delay, which put many more people at risk? Should they not have erred on the side of caution? There are various possibilities. Perhaps the authorities had such faith in their isolation and protection techniques that they thought it impossible that a health worker could contract Ebola while working under state-of-the-art conditions in a Western hospital, as opposed to in Africa. Or perhaps (as I'm beginning to suspect) the diagnostic criteria for Ebola aren't rigorous enough. One of the first symptoms of Ebola is a fever, defined as above 101.5. But see this [emphasis mine]: