A nurse who also suffered from Ebola virus Is now stable and is comfortable in a specialized hospital in Maryland ... the nurse left the the hospital where she was working free .. she got Ebola virus while she was treating Thomas Eric Duncan
Nina Pham, 26, “is quite stable now and resting comfortably”, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said at a press conference on Friday. “She’s a highly intelligent, aware person who knows exactly what’s going on,” he said.
Dr Kent Brantly transfuse her blood for antibodies production to fight against the virus; for privacy reasons Fauci would not say if she had also received experimental drugs.
Fauci said “We fully intend to have this patient walk out of this hospital,”
After Duncan, who infected with virus before arriving in the US, died ,,two nurses, Pham and Amber Vinson, also diagnosed with Ebola.
In all, more than 135 people are being monitored for signs of Ebola, including 75 healthcare workers, 48 other people who may have had contact with Duncan and a handful of people who may have had contact with the nurses, and one dog.
Vinson was transferred to Emory University hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this week for treatment at a specialist facility there. A day before Vinson was diagnosed, she travelled on a Frontier airlines commercial flight from Ohio to Texas, despite having a low-grade fever.
Vinson, who was self-monitoring at the time, had called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before travelling to Ohio, and was not stopped from flying.
On Thursday, the CDC announced that it was expanding its search for possible contacts, and interviewing passengers who travelled on Vinson’s initial Frontier Airlines flight from Dallas to Cleveland on 10 October, because new information revealed that investigators could not rule out the possibility that she was ill as early as last Friday. It was initially thought she became ill on 13 October, the day she returned to Dallas. The agency has since changed its guidelines on travel for people being monitored for the virus.
The CDC director, Tom Frieden, said the agency will ensure that in future those being monitored for symptoms of the virus do not travel publicly. The CDC recommends only “controlled movement” for individuals being monitored, which can include travel by private plane or vehicle. In Dallas, county officials have asked all 75 healthcare workers under monitoring to pledge to stay away from the public.
Even so, on Friday morning, the state department announced that a hospital worker who may have had contact with Duncan’s blood samples, had left the country on a Caribbean cruise while self-monitoring. He has placed himself in voluntary quarantine, and the ship’s doctor said he is in good condition. The hospital worker left for his cruise before the CDC altered its rules.
In Texas, meanwhile, Governor Rick Perry on Friday urged the president to ban travel from the west African nations where Ebola is raging.
“Air travel is in fact how this disease crosses borders and it’s certainly how it got to Texas in the first place,” Perry said during a news conference in Austin. He said there should be an exception for aid workers, who are desperately needed to help fight the virus in west Africa. Several members of Congress, including the speaker of the House, John Boehner, have called for a travel ban, which the president has been reluctant to consider.
Public health officials have decried a ban that would prevent travellers from west Africa’s hardest-hit countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – from entering the US. They say it will restrict aid and healthcare workers from entering the countries, which could exacerbate the outbreak that has already claimed the lives of more than 4,500 people.
Perry also discussed preliminary recommendations from a task force he assembled last week charged with improving the state’s readiness to deal with additional Ebola cases.
The task force suggested designating Ebola treatment centres across the state where ill people can with the relevant travel history can seek treatment.
The centres would be equipped with protective equipment and specially trained healthcare workers.
The force also recommended that healthcare workers receive expanded training on how to tackle Ebola effected patients.
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