President Barack Obama called an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday after a second hospital worker was diagnosed with the
Ebola virus, a day after she had travelled on an internal US flight with 132 passengers.
US healthcare officials are seeking passengers who flew on the Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Dallas-Forth Worth on Monday, the day before the nurse started showing symptoms of the virus that killed a patient she treated at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.
Mr Obama abruptly called off a political fundraising trip to New Jersey and Connecticut for Democrats running in next month’s mid-term elections and convened a cabinet meeting to co-ordinate the response to the Ebola cases.
The postponement of the campaign events indicated “the seriousness of this situation”, the president’s spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Night flight
The move marks an escalation in the level of concern at the White House after the nurse, the second case of the disease to be transmitted within the US, had travelled on the flight the night before her Ebola symptoms appeared.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US agency managing the government’s response to the virus, said it wanted to speak to passengers on Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 “because of the proximity in time between the evening flight and first report of illness the following morning”.
Any passengers “determined to be at any potential risk will be actively monitored”, the agency said.
The hospital worker, who had flown to Cleveland on October 10th, had not exhibited any signs of illness during the return flight, the crew said, according to the statement from the centres and Frontier Airlines. The aircraft has been taken out of service by the airline.
‘Extensive contact
’ CDC director Thomas Frieden said the second woman to be infected in the US – identified as nurse Amber Joy Vinson (29) – should not have travelled on the commercial flight after having “extensive contact” with Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan, who died on October 8th in Dallas.
She was being monitored for signs of Ebola at the time, he said, and should have been subjected to “controlled movement” under the agency’s guidelines.
Ms Vinson is being transferred for treatment to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, he said. This is the same hospital that cured a medical doctor and US missionary of the disease after they returned from west Africa, where more than 4,400 people have died from the Ebola virus.
Ms Vinson was diagnosed with Ebola two days after another nurse, Nina Pham (26), became the first person to catch Ebola in the US. Both nurses had been part of the medical team that treated Mr Duncan, who died just under two weeks after he arrived in the US from west Africa.
Mr Frieden said the two nurses had “extensive contact” with Mr Duncan, the first case of Ebola in the US, during his most infectious days when he was producing extensive amounts of vomit and diarrhoea caused by the illness.
They were among about 50 healthcare workers who cared for him during his 11 days in the Texas hospital.
Mr Obama postponed his travel plans a day after he said an Ebola epidemic in the United States was “highly unlikely” because of the strength of the US public healthcare infrastructure.
