50 being watched
Texas group is checked daily for virus.
DALLAS — Fifty people in Texas will be monitored daily for possible Ebola symptoms, including 10 who are considered at high risk because of their exposure to a patient now being treated for the deadly virus, public health officials said Friday.
The larger group includes healthcare workers and the ambulance team that brought the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where he has been in isolation and undergoing treatment since Sunday. Included in the smaller group are four people who were in the apartment where Duncan stayed after his arrival from Liberia on Sept. 20.
The four— a woman, her 13- year- old son and two adult nephews— have been confined in the apartment, but were moved to a private house Friday, the same daya hazardous- materials team arrived to clean the residence.
Duncan is the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. It is believed he contracted the virus in Liberia while helping to move a pregnant woman who later died.
He then took a series of flights to visit family in Dallas. Duncan first sought medical care at Texas Health Presbyterian on Sept. 25, but was given antibiotics and released. Three days later, he was taken by ambulance back to the hospital, where he remains in serious condition.
The case has raised questions about the public heath response and has prompted varying levels of fear among the general population, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, acknowledged at a Friday afternoon briefing at the White House. The areas of concern include Duncan’s passage through several airports, his initial treatment at the Dallas hospital and why local officials took days to clean the apartment where Duncan had stayed.
Responding to questions, Fauci agreed the local actions could be seen as “missteps,” but said he doubted there would be an outbreak of Ebola in the United States. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said she understood the anxiety that even one case of Ebola could bring, but said the country had “the public health providers to contain the spread of this disease.”
Partof the confidence, officials in Washington said, is based on how local officials are seeking out those who may have been exposed. Since Duncan’s diagnosis, public health officials have been tracing all of his contacts, and their contacts as well.
This week, state officials said they were looking at 100 people, with a core group of 12 to18.
In their daily telephone briefing, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state of Texas and Dallas County said they had winnowed the number down to about 50 who would need daily monitoring, including having their temperatures taken to detect fevers.
The tracers looked at direct contacts, indirect contacts, healthcare workers and laboratory technicians who may have handled blood.
Dr. Beth Bell, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said the monitoring would go on for 21 days, the time in which Ebola appears after exposure to someone who is infectious. No symptoms have been reported so far, but she cautioned: “It is not outside the realm of possibility that we will have more Ebola cases here in the United States.”
While officials worked to reassure the public, the Ivy Apartments complex, where Duncan had stayed with family and friends, was a flurry of activity, as hazardousmaterial teams bagged materials from the unit he inhabited and brought them out.