UPDATE: Hospital Says Dallas Ebola Patient in Critical Condition
Photo Credit: AP / LM OteroBy JAMIE STENGLE AND EMILY SCHMALL.
After hospital officials on Saturday said the condition of the lone Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. has worsened, the woman he came to Texas to visit said she is praying for his recovery.
Louise Troh said that she was not aware until a reporter told her that Thomas Eric Duncan’s condition had been deemed critical and that she had not spoken with him Saturday.
“I pray in Jesus’ name that it will be all right,” Troh said in a telephone interview from the home where she and three others are being isolated.
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas didn’t provide any further details or respond to questions about Duncan’s health on Saturday. The hospital has previously said Duncan, who was being kept in isolation, was in serious but stable condition.
Duncan traveled from disease-ravaged Liberia to Dallas last month before he began showing symptoms of the disease that has killed some 3,400 people in West Africa.
Read more from this story HERE.
____________________________________________________________________
For CDC team in Dallas, the search is on for those who had contact with Ebola patient
By Amy Ellis Nutt.
For the doctors, nurses and epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who landed in Dallas this week, it all boiled down to this: Who had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person in this country to be diagnosed with the deadly Ebola infection, and who might have had contact with him? In other words, it was all about information.
First up was interviewing Duncan, known in CDC investigative parlance as the “index subject.” Then the 10-member team led by infectious disease expert David Kuhar began where most information-gatherers begin — by making a list. Actually, by making two lists. One included the names of the people with whom Duncan might have had contact in his two visits to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. The other list — well, it included everyone else.
They divided themselves into two teams. Those creating the hospital list took up residence in a human resources office on the eighth floor of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Pediatrician and epidemic intelligence officer Matt Karwowski was assigned to the community list. He and his team holed up in a first-floor conference room in the Fogelson Forum, next to the main medical building.
Three CDC investigators and one county epidemiologist would visit each home on the two lists and interview every person in every household who might have come in contact with Duncan.
Read more from this story HERE.
