Situation Report

REUTERS                                                          Wed Oct 15, 2014 5:10pm EDT

Chances that other passengers on the plane were infected were very low, but the nurse should not have been traveling on the flight, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters.

The woman, Amber Vinson, 29, was isolated immediately after reporting a fever on Tuesday, Texas Department of State Health Services officials said. She had treated Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died of Ebola and was the first patient diagnosed with the virus in the United States.

Vinson, a worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, had taken a Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday, officials said.

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.”