US Ebola patient ‘humble’ after virus scare
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AN American TV news cameraman treated for Ebola was ready to go home yesterday, the fifth patient transported from West Africa to recover at a United States hospital, as President Barack Obama’s new Ebola “czar” got to work trying to pull together a national response to the deadly disease.
Two nurses remain in hospital after catching the virus from a Liberian man who died at a Dallas hospital. Because of their cases, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued more stringent safety guidelines this week and is working with states to distribute them to health workers across the US.
“Recovering from Ebola is a truly humbling feeling,” video journalist Ashoka Mukpo said in a statement issued on Tuesday from the Nebraska Medical Center.
“Too many are not as fortunate and lucky as I’ve been. I’m very happy to be alive.”
The virus has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, nearly all in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Mukpo got it while working in Liberia as a freelance cameraman for NBC and other media outlets. He has been at the Nebraska hospital since October 6, and was the second Ebola patient to be treated there.
The hospital said on Tuesday that tests showed Mukpo was free of the virus and that he would be allowed to leave its biocontainment unit yesterday.
Debra Berry, the mother of Dallas nurse Amber Vinson, said on Tuesday that her daughter is “doing OK, just trying to get stronger” while being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Fellow Dallas nurse Nina Pham’s condition has been upgraded from fair to good at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington.
At the White House, former adviser and veteran political operator Ron Klain was meeting with Obama and top aides in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon to officially start his new Ebola duties.
Obama named Klain last week to take charge of coordinating the array of federal agencies dealing with Ebola in the US and helping to tackle the crisis in West Africa.
Resisting pressure to ban travel from Ebola-stricken countries, the US was tightening rules in an effort to ensure all arrivals from the three nations are screened for the disease.
Under restrictions taking effect yesterday, air travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea must enter the US through one of five airports doing special screenings and fever checks. A handful of people had been arriving at other airports and missing the checks.
A total of 562 air travelers have been checked in the screenings that started on October 11 at New York’s Kennedy airport and expanded to four others last week, Homeland Security officials said. Four were taken from Washington’s Dulles airport to a local hospital. None had Ebola.
The tightened rules for West African travelers came as Rwanda said it will begin checking visiting Americans for the disease.
Many US lawmakers and members of the public have been pushing for a ban on travel into the US from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. But Obama and federal health authorities said that could make the situation worse, by making it harder for foreign doctors and aid workers to get help to nations that desperately need it and can’t stop the outbreak on their own.
There are no direct flights from the three countries into the US. The government has said as many as 150 fliers per day arriving by various multi-leg routes was typical, but that number has dropped since the Ebola outbreak began in March.
When the Ebola screenings began at five airports, US officials said about 6 percent of arrivals from the affected nations were coming through other airports that didn’t have the fever checks. By changing that, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said there are measures in place to identify people arriving in the US “who we have reason to believe have been present in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea.”
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