|
The unidentified woman had indicated a fever on Tuesday.
The Dallas health-care worker, that provided care for the first Ebola patient, was isolated within 90 minutes at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, one official from Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was carrying out confirmatory testing and tracking of a preliminary Ebola test administrated late Tuesday at a state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, which came as positive.
Emergency workers in hazardous materials suits began work before dawn Wednesday to decontaminate the Dallas residence of the second hospital worker. Memos distributed to friends and neighbors, advise them that "a health care worker who lives in your area has tested positive for Ebola."
It's not exactly clear how the second health care worker contracted the infection, and officials declined to say what position she holds at the Dallas center or the kind of forethought she gave.
"We are taking a look at each component of our individual assurance gear and disease control in the healing facility," said Dr. Daniel Varga, head clinical officer for Texas Health Resources, which runs Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.
Authorities have said they likewise don't know how the first health care worker, a nurse, got to be contaminated. Now the second case indicated slips in protocol on how one individual may have wore and removed individual protective clothing.
"An additional health care worker testing positive for Ebola is a serious concern, and the CDC has effectively made dynamic moves to minimize the danger to health care workers and the patient," the CDC said in an announcement.
"What happened there (in Dallas), paying little heed to the reason, is not acceptable. It shouldn't have happened," an executive of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of NIH, said on MSNBC on Wednesday.
Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, has let it be known ,the government wasn't aggressive enough in managing Ebola and containing the virus as it spread from an infected patient to a nurse at a Dallas facility.
"We could've sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital from day one about exactly how this should be managed," he said Tuesday.
Frieden went over new steps this week said to stop the spread of the disease, including creating an Ebola response team, more training for health care workers nationwide and procedure changes at the Texas hospital to shrink the risk of more infections.
"I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient — the first patient — was diagnosed. That might have prevented this infection," Frieden mentioned.
The grim admission came as the World Health Organization projected the pace of infections moving quickly in West Africa to as many as 10,000 new cases per week within only two months.
| |
