Health - US

Officials work to decontaminate the apartment of the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola.
(Photo: Maj. Max Geron, Dallas Police Department)

A second person involved in the care of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has contracted the disease. The news follows a scathing report by a nurses union that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had "no protocol" in place to care for Duncan.

usatoday.com - by Rick Jervis and Doug Stanglin - October 15, 2014

DALLAS — A second hospital worker who helped care for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for the disease, prompting local officials to warn Wednesday that more cases "is a real possibility."

The unidentified health-care worker, who was described as a woman who lived alone without pets, reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

At an early morning news conference, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said he could not rule out more cases among 75 other hospital staffers who cared for Duncan and were being monitored by the CDC.

dfw.cbslocal.com - October 14, 2014

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Two weeks after the first Ebola diagnosis on American soil, the Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden says the organization should have sent a larger response team to insure the virus did not spread to anyone else.

Learning from past mistakes, the CDC has now established an “Ebola response team” that will travel to any place where Ebola is diagnosed, should there be another case identified in the country.  Such a team is now on the ground in Dallas, said Frieden.

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Environmental-Cleaning Guys sprayed disinfectant Sunday outside the apartment complex on Marquita Street where the nurse who contracted Ebola lives. The hospital parking lot she uses and her car were also decontaminated, officials said.  Jim Tuttle/Staff Photographer

dallasnews.com - by Jeffrey Weiss - October 14, 2014

Ebola care instructions at a Dallas hospital and across the country were changed by federal officials on Monday — a tacit admission that training and procedures used for America’s first case of the disease had come up short.

The changes were prompted by the discovery that a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas had become infected while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in the hospital last Wednesday.

The transmission of the deadly virus to the nurse “doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to take care of Ebola safely. But it does change substantially how we approach it,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable.”

NBC NEWS                                                            OCT. 14, 2014

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced Tuesday they are donating $25 million to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control foundation to fight the Ebola crisis that has killed more than 4,440 people in west Africa.

"We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn't spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio," Zuckerberg, who is worth $32 billion, said in a Facebook post. "We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome."

The health agency has hundreds of staffers working on Ebola and has sent more than 100 experts to the virus zone — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The CDC foundation collects funds for supplies, such as personal protective equipment, ready-to-eat meals, generators, vehicles and motorcycles, and thermal scanners to detect fever.

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