Josh Levs and
Holly Yan, of
CNN report
Second U.S. health worker infected with Ebola flew the day before symptoms, the CDC is trying to contact 132 passengers on a plane the nurse traveled on the day before she showed symptoms, and President Obama has cancelled his scheduled trip to New Jersey and Connecticut to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on the topic.
"Because of the proximity in time between the evening flight and first report of illness the following morning, CDC is reaching out to passengers who flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth Oct. 13," the CDC said in a statement. The flight landed Monday at 8:16 p.m. CT.
The C.D.C. call seems to be a "surplus of caution" because their protocols presume the Ebola virus cannot be spread until the patient shows symptoms.
However, doubts have been raised as to why the protocols for Personal Personal Equipment in remote poor field hospitals in Western African are higher than those established for health care workers in the United States.
The woman "exhibited no symptoms or sign of illness while on flight 1143, according to the crew," Frontier Airlines said in a statement.
Nevertheless the CDC is asking passengers who were on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 to call the CDC and the airline said the airplane was "cleaned" before the next flight with their standard cleaning, but they have now taken the airplane out of service.
The airline said customers who may have traveled on either flight should contact the CDC at 1-800-CDC-INFO (1-800-232-4636). But the CDC statement referred only to passengers on the October 13 flight.
The October 13 flight was cleaned thoroughly after it landed, "per our normal procedures which is consistent with CDC guidelines," the airline said. After the airline was informed of the Ebola patient, the plane was removed from service.
CNN Elizabeth Cohen has also raised question as to why a person on the watch list for treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola in the Texas Presbyterian Health Hospital was allowed to fly.
Questions have also been raised about whether Duncan, and other Ebola patients ought to be transferred to one of the nations four hospitals with special rooms and staff trained to treat such infectious diseases once identified as having Ebola.
Nurses unions are demanding a higher level of training and equipment.
9:58 AM PT: Ebola Today: Health Care Worker With Ebola Flew on Monday; Obama Postpones Travel for Ebola by Chelsea Rice of the Boston Globe provides additional details, including allegations by nurses that they were told to use "Duct Tape" to cover areas of their neck left exposed by the personal protective gear they were issued for use.
The President is expected to speak after this meeting.
• 12:24 a.m. EST: Tape. Seriously, tape. In light of Nina Pham, a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian who is the first person to contract the Ebola virus on American soil, National Nurses United (the largest nurses union in the country) released details of the alleged conditions at the Dallas hospital that may have lead to Pham contracting the virus.
- Lab samples from Thomas Eric Duncan (who died Oct. 8) traveled through the hospital’s general specimen delivery system, putting it at risk for contamination.
- Duncan potentially exposed seven other patients to Ebola when on Sept. 28 he was not isolated for several hours in the emergency department.
- The nurses who cared for Duncan also cared for other patients
- Training for Ebola was an optional seminar.
- Nurses weren’t held to a consistent set of guidelines.
- To keep “flimsy” garments secure, nurses had to use medical tape. ...
• Tuesday, 3:12 p.m. EST: It’s our fault, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted yesterday that they weren’t aggressive enough managing Ebola and containing the virus at the hospital.
“I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient, the first patient, was diagnosed,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC, in a press conference Tuesday afternoon. “That might have prevented this infection. But we will do that from today onward with any case, anywhere in the U.S.”
Number of cases worldwide in the current outbreak: 8,400
Number of deaths: 4,033
10:00 AM PT: CNN is announcing that it is reviewing all of the health care workers who worked with Duncan. This nurse was treating Duncan extensively during his most infectious time.
10:10 AM PT: CDC Director Thomas Freidman is announcing on a live phone conference that nurses should not use additional duct tape or 'triple glove" in the thought that this provides them with extra protection because it makes it more difficult to take the PPE off, which can place them at extra risk.
He feels the nurses and other health care officials should be safest if they use standard PPE in the standard was they are used to.
He said their special CDC teams have noticed local hospital workers using duct tape to "enhance their protection" which may have the opposite effect.
10:17 AM PT: Meanwhile in Western Africa the situation remains out of control and getting worse. The WHO anticipates by December we will have 10,000 new cases per week.
11:34 AM PT: NPR is reporting that the second infected nurse should not have been traveling.
CNN has raised national anxiety when Sanjay Gupta said the nurse actually had a fever when she flew, but it wasn't to the 100.4 threshold.
A nurse union representative is saying that Texas Presbyterian had no protocols for collection of waste, or to prevent cross contamination, and were lied to. And nurses were not trained.
"Some supervisors said even the N-95 masks were not necessary, the gowns exposed their necks, ... initially the nurses were not given booties, ... " i.e. major screw up.
The CDC is transferring the second news to Emory hospital which has a higher level of certification for handling infectious disease.
The question was raised about cleaning between flights which CNN's aviation expert, Mary Shiavo, saying the legally the nurse was allowed to travel but should not have.
Here are some paragraphs from the just breaking NPR report,
CDC: Second Dallas Health Worker 'Should Not Have Traveled'
The CDC director said:
Asked why the woman, who was self-monitoring her temperature, was allowed to board an airplane after exposure to the index patient, Frieden said: "The patient traveled to Ohio before it was known that the first health care worker [Pham] was sick."
Pressed on the question, he said: "She should not have traveled on a commercial airliner" and noted that "from this moment forward we will make sure that any individual who is being monitored" should not travel on public transportation.
Frieden said she had an elevated temperature on the flight home to Dallas (99.5F) , but short of the fever threshold. The CDC believes she presents a low risk to fellow passengers, he said. ...
Rawlings said of the situation in the city: "It's going to get worse before it gets better. But it will get better."
"We did send some expertise in infection control," Frieden said. "But I think we could, in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, have sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from day one about exactly how this should be managed."
11:55 AM PT: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
12:36 PM PT: Fresh Ebola Fears Hit Airline Stocks
Shares of the biggest U.S. airlines tumbled between 2 percent and 4 percent in afternoon trading. The overall market slumped on concerns about slowing global economic growth.
Frontier Airlines announced that public-health officials were notifying the 132 passengers on Monday night's Flight 1143 from Cleveland to Dallas-Fort Worth. The airline's crew reports that the woman showed no symptoms during the flight.
Robert Mann, an aviation consultant and former American Airlines executive, said that if the second worker showed no symptoms on her Frontier flight, the decision to notify other passengers was made out of extra caution. "But all that rational thought aside, it may cause some people to delay trips," he said.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it was extremely unlikely that passengers could contract the disease because the health care worker was not vomiting or bleeding. But, he said, she should not have been on the flight. ...
United Continental Holdings Inc. was down $1.22, or 2.8 percent, to $41.95; Delta Air Lines Inc. fell 82 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $31.97; and American Airlines Group Inc. dropped 44 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $31.07.
The overall market is also down 1.9% on fears of slowing global economic activity.
2:51 PM PT: President Obama is speaking making the point that the CDC protocols work if followed properly.
To insure better implementation he has ordered the CDC to send a special "SWAT Team" to any hospital that receives a new Ebola case to make sure the staff is fully trained and understands the protocols.
To indicate how confident of these protocols he is, he said he shook hands and kiss many of the nurses and health officials at Emory Hospital after their successful treatment of a patient there.
2:53 PM PT: President Obama noted that our efforts to control in Liberia and Western Africa are not just humanitarian but also an investment in global health. So the president has spoken to leaders of Japan, France, UK, and other countries to better coordinate our efforts to control Ebola there.
The President reiterates that the chance of a widespread outbreak in the US is very low.
3:15 PM PT: Thomas Eric Duncan's nephew dispute Texas Presbyterian Hospital's narrative on first Ebola patient in xx
Exclusive: Ebola didn’t have to kill Thomas Eric Duncan, nephew says
Thomas Eric Duncan was a victim of a broken system. The biggest unanswered question about my uncle’s death is why the hospital would send home a patient with a 103-degree fever and stomach pains who had recently been in Liberia — and he told them he had just returned from Liberia explicitly due to the Ebola threat.
Some speculate that this was a failure of the internal communications systems. Others have speculated that antibiotics and Tylenol are the standard protocol for a patient without insurance.
Thomas Eric Duncan could have been saved. Finally, what is most difficult for us — Thomas Eric’s mother, children and those closest to him — to accept is the fact that our loved one could have been saved. From his botched release from the emergency room to his delayed testing and delayed treatment and the denial of experimental drugs that have been available to every other case of Ebola treated in the U.S., the hospital invited death every step of the way. ...
For our family, the most humiliating part of this ordeal was the treatment we received from the hospital. For the 10 days he was in the hospital, they not only refused to help us communicate with Thomas Eric, but they also acted as an impediment. The day Thomas Eric died, we learned about it from the news media, not his doctors.
5:13 PM PT: Amber Vinson says CDC told her it was okay for her to fly after several calls where she reported her symptoms of low grade fever and feeling poorlyCDC approved of Amber Vision's flight she claims