US nurse’s Ebola turns scrutiny to health workers

DALLAS: Health officials are intensifying the monitoring of hospital workers who provided care to the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the US after one of them was infected with the virus despite wearing protective gear.
Tests confirmed the first known case of Ebola transmitted in the nation, raising questions about assurances by health officials here that the disease will be contained and any American hospital should be able to treat it.
Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday that there had been a breach of protocol that led the worker to become infected while treating patient Thomas Eric Duncan, but officials are not sure what went wrong. Duncan, who traveled from Liberia to visit family, did not get sick until he arrived in the US He died Wednesday.
The Spanish government defended Monday its decision to repatriate two elderly missionaries who contracted Ebola in west Africa, creating the conditions for a Madrid nurse to catch the deadly virus.
“The government did what it had to do. The duty of a state is to protect its citizens, especially when they are in difficult circumstances, far from Spain,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in an interview published in daily El Pais.
“All developed nations which faced the same problem did the same,” he added.
Teresa Romero, a nurse at Madrid’s Carlos III hospital where the two missionaries were cared for, on October 6 became the first person diagnosed as having become infected with the virus outside of Africa.
The 44-year-old had volunteered to help the two missionaries who were flown home from west Africa in August and September and later died of the disease. She is listed as in stable but serious condition.
Fifteen people considered as having had “high risk contact” with Romero, including her husband, are being monitored at the hospital, none of whom have shown any symptoms.