DALLAS — The airline passenger who brought Ebola into the U.S. initially went to a Dallas emergency room last week but was sent home, despite telling a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa, the hospital said Wednesday
DALLAS — The airline passenger who brought Ebola into the U.S. initially went to a Dallas emergency room last week but was sent home, despite telling a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa, the hospital said Wednesday in a disclosure that showed how easily an infection could be missed.
The decision by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to release the patient, who had recently arrived from Liberia, could have put others at risk of exposure to Ebola before the man went back to the ER a couple of days later, when his condition worsened.
A day after the diagnosis was confirmed, a nine-member team of federal health officials was tracking anyone who had close contact with him after he fell ill on Sept. 24. The group of 12 to 18 people included three members of the ambulance crew that took the man to the hospital and a handful of schoolchildren.
They will be checked every day for 21 days, the disease’s incubation period.
“That’s how we’re going to break the chain of transmission, and that’s where our focus has to be,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press Wednesday.
The CDC reminded the nation’s health care providers to ask patients with symptoms if they’ve traveled recently. The American College of Emergency Physicians planned to alert its members as well.
