NEW YORK – A health-care worker who treated Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan at a Dallas hospital has been diagnosed with Ebola.
It’s the first known case of the disease being transmitted in the U.S.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said Sunday morning that the health-care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had treated Duncan multiple times.
Frieden said anyone who treated Duncan is now considered to be potentially exposed. But he could not give an exact number of the health-care workers considered at risk.
CNN, citing an official familiar with the case, said the patient is a female nurse.
A preliminary test result in Dallas was later confirmed independently by the CDC in Atlanta.
Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital said at a Sunday press conference that the health-care worker treated Duncan after his second visit and was wearing protective gloves, a gown and a mask.
She was not part of the original high-risk pool of 48 people who are being monitored because of contact with Duncan.
Dr. Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer of Texas Health Resources, said another person also remains in isolation, and the hospital has stopped accepting new emergency room patients.
In a teleconference with reporters Sunday morning, Freiden said the CDC was “very concerned” about the new Ebola case.
“We do not know what occurred in the care of the index patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, but a breach of protocol caused the infection to occur,” Freiden said.
The CDC said symptoms in the second patient developed Saturday, and there was a preliminary positive test for Ebola Sunday.
Freiden said the CDC was taking four steps:
- Doing everything possible to care for the second patient;
- Working to track the one contact the health care worker appears to have made after contracting the disease;
- Conducting an investigation into the health-care protocols in place to determine how the breach occurred;
- And taking steps to modify the health-care protocols to avoid a third case of Ebola.
“There is a need to enhance training of health-care workers dealing with Ebola, because even a single breach can cause an infection of Ebola,” Frieden stressed.
Asked whether or not Ebola patients should be treated in specialized health care facilities, rather than in general hospitals, he replied: “We cannot let any hospital let down its guard dealing with a potential Ebola case.”
He said anyone who has been in Guinea, Sierra Leone or Liberia in the past 21 days and has a fever should be isolated and evaluated in a hospital setting.
“We need all hospitals everywhere in the United States to be capable of evaluating and admitting Ebola cases where the diagnosis for Ebola is positive,” he said.
Frieden said a full-time case manager will be established in Texas with the sole responsibility of monitoring and supervising the safety protocols of health-care workers dealing with Ebola patients.
“The necessity to do all health-care protocols correctly 100 percent of the time in treating Ebola procedures emphasizes the need of training and supervision,” he said.
Frieden deflected questions suggesting that hospitals throughout the country were not adequately trained, supervised or otherwise prepared to deal with Ebola patients in an environment in which even the slightest breach of protocol could result in additional infections.
He continued to insist procedures the CDC has developed for containing the Ebola outbreak in the U.S. are adequate, provided health-care officials throughout the nation follow them meticulously in all cases.
Frieden repeatedly said the CDC was “deeply concerned” about the second case of Ebola in the U.S.
The CDC chief was asked: “Can you explain how a health-care worker caught the disease with a minor breach of health-care safety measures yet those in contact with Duncan at the apartment did not get infected?”
Frieden noted the apartment contacts are still not out of the 21-day incubation period.
He explained that an Ebola patient becomes more infectious as the disease advances and there is an increase in vomiting and diarrhea.
More to come …
