Doctors treating New York City’s first Ebola patient have given the ailing doctor a transfusion of blood plasma from an aid worker who was infected with the deadly disease in West Africa and survived.
Dr. Craig Spencer received the donated plasma Friday from Nancy Writebol, a health care worker with the Christian organization SIM. Writebol was treated in August at Emory Hospital in Georgia.
Bellevue Hospital, where Spencer is being treated, said Saturday evening that the 33-year-old physician is “entering the next phase of his illness as anticipated with the appearance of gastrointestinal symptoms.”
The public hospital said in a statement that the patient is “awake and communicating.”
One day after governors in New York, New Jersey and Illinois imposed a mandatory 21-day quarantine on medical workers returning from Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa, public health officials in the District, Maryland and Virginia did not follow suit Saturday, intensifying a national debate over how to prevent the spread of the disease.
Health officials are working to develop a consistent approach for the area around the nation’s capital. Joxel Garcia, director of the D.C. Department of Health, said that a mandatory quarantine was not scientifically justified and could have a chilling effect on the medical personnel, many of them volunteers, needed to treat Ebola patients at home and overseas.
The differing views highlight challenges confronting federal and state politicians as well as health officials as they race to keep up with fast-changing circumstances and competing political, scientific and legal demands, experts said.
Health workers at Bellevue Hospital in New York on Oct. 8 demonstrated the gear that staff would wear to treat patients with Ebola.Credit Adrees Latif/Reuters
NEW YORK TIMES Oct. 25, 2014
Detailed description of the differences in the way the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital and New York's Bellevue hospital handled their Ebola patients:.
"When Craig Spencer, a young doctor just back from treating patients with Ebola in Guinea, fell ill with the virus in New York on Thursday, the paramedics who went to get him were dressed in protective suits. He entered Bellevue Hospital through a rear door, far from the busy emergency room, and was taken to a state-of-the-art isolation ward that was locked and guarded.
New York City Council District 7 Community Liason Fidel Malena hands out flyers about Ebola risk near the apartment building of Ebola patient Dr. Craig Spencer, in New York, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014. Spencer remained in stable condition while isolated in a hospital, talking by cellphone to his family and assisting disease detectives who are accounting for his every movement since arriving in New York from Guinea via Europe on Oct. 17. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) | ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- As news of New York City's first confirmed Ebola case spreads through the city, New Yorkers -- even those at the hospital where the patient is being treated, who rode the same subway lines he traveled on and who live in his building -- are remaining markedly calm....
Zachary Hasselbring, a New York University student riding the A train, ...said "I think everybody's overreacting a bit," he said. "It's blown out of proportion."
Workers and volunteers face unease after flying to virus epicenters
Dr. David Schnabel, epidemic intelligence service officer with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, works with database training of Ministry of Health staff at the Bo District Surveillance Office in Sierra Leone in August. (Gbessay Saffa)
"David Schnabel, a former Army doctor who lives in Baltimore, said he hasn’t talked much with people he doesn’t know about his five-week trip to Sierra Leone. Schnabel, who was working for the CDC in the hard-hit Bo District, returned on Sept. 29.
“'I can tell you I did not broadcast where I had been before or after I returned to strangers,” said Schnabel, who trained Sierra Leoneans on Ebola safety protocols rather than caring for patients. “I understood the emotional response to Ebola. To protect myself from any stigma, I consciously was careful who I told.'”
NEW YORK TIMES Oct. 25, 2014 by David W. Shin and Liz Robbins
The surprise decision by the governors of New York and New Jersey yesterday to impose a mandatory quarantine on persons who arrived at area airports and had contact with Ebola infected persons has touched off concern that it will deter people from volunteering to work in West Africa.
"Among medical professionals who have been fighting Ebola in West Africa, the restrictions only intensified the debate. While a few of those interviewed said an overabundance of caution was welcome, the vast majority said that restrictions like those adopted by New York and New Jersey could cripple volunteers’ efforts at the front lines of the epidemic."
" Dr. Rick Sacra, who contracted Ebola in Liberia and was flown back to the United States to be treated in September, said...many doctors and nurses who volunteered would spend about three weeks in Africa and then return to their regular jobs. The requirement that they be quarantined at home upon their return “will effectively double the burden on those people, on the loss of productive time,” Dr. Sacra said.
WASHINGTON --In nine days of enhanced screening at five major American airports of passengers from West African countries hit by Ebola, only three of the 552 arrivals had high temperatures, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics. The passengers went through seconary screening and none of them was found to have Ebola, according to a DHS document.
The figures were in a chart contained in DHS statement describing the agency's role in helping counter Ebola with
enhanced screening at airports. The chart covered the period from October 11 when the screening started, through
NEW YORK --The governors of New York and New Jersey announced Friday afternoon that they were ordering all people entering the country through two area airports who had direct contact with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to be quarantined.
The announcement comes one day after an American doctor, who had worked in Guinea and returned to New York City earlier in October, tested positive for Ebola and became the first New York patient of the deadly virus.
“A voluntary Ebola quarantine is not enough,” said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. “This is too serious a public health situation.”
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS/MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERE OCT. 23, 2014
Doctors without Borders (MSF) describes its specific guidelines and protocols for staff members returning from Ebola assignments. The guidlines were posted following the hospitalization of Dr. Craig Smith, one of its workers, in New York City yesterday.
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is considering quarantining healthcare workers returning to the United States from the Ebola hot zone of West Africa, after a New York doctor who treated Ebola patients there tested positive for the virus.
Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters on Friday that quarantine is among a number of options being discussed by officials from across the administration.
Staff of the emergency medical services in France (SAMU) wear Ebola virus protection outfits during a press presentation at the Necker Hospital in Paris, October 24, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Philippe Wojazer
"There are a number of options being discussed pertaining to the monitoring and mobility of healthcare workers who are returning to the United States from affected countries," Skinner said.
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