Dive Brief:
- During a news conference on Tuesday, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency could have responded better to the infection of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
- Frieden said the department did send some infection control experts to the hospital, but, looking back, they should have sent more reinforcements from day one to manage the treatment and combat the spread of the disease.
- Nina Pham, a nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, was infected with Ebola while caring for Duncan, who died last week. And on Wednesday morning, officials announced that a second healthcare worker who treated Duncan had tested positive for the virus. More than 70 people were exposed to Duncan during treatment and no one knows exactly how the two healthcare workers were infected. An Ebola response team will now be sent within hours to any hospital with a confirmed case of the disease, Frieden said.
Dive Insight:
The Ebola response team will include doctors, laboratory scientists, and epidemiologists who will work with a hospital on aspects like protective equipment and transfer of waste materials.
“I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the first patient was diagnosed,” Frieden said at the conference. “That might have prevented this infection [of the nurse]. But we will do that from today onward with any case anywhere in the U.S.”
Several other Ebola patients have been treated in the United States at Emory University Hospital and Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Two nurses from Emory have traveled to Texas Presbyterian to work with the hospital on infection control measures.
Pham had direct contact with only one person while she displayed symptoms. That person is being monitored, along with the 48 people who had direct contact with Duncan while he was symptomatic. None of Duncan’s close contacts have shown symptoms after two weeks, a sign they likely were not infected.