The second medical worker recently confirmed of being infected with Ebola was transferred from Dallas to a special bio-containment facility in Atlanta, Georgia, according to an official announcement made on Wednesday cited by The Guardian. The Center for Disease Control thus confirms its failings in response to the introduction of the dangerous virus in the United States.
According to a statement made by the CDC, the 29 year old Dallas nurse, Amber Vinson, has traveled on a commercial plane from Cleveland, Ohio, to Dallas with a low-grade temperature just one day before she was diagnosed with the disease. While in Ohio, the nurse reportedly traveled from Cleveland to Akron. A federal source (cited by the CNN) has revealed that the nurse reported having a fever of 99.5F (37.5C) before boarding the flight on October 13th, but since this temperature was below the threshold set by the CDC she was allowed to travel.
Amber Vinson is the second nurse diagnosed with the dangerous disease in the Texas Presbyterian Hospital, the medical facility that has treated the first Ebola victim in the US, Thomas Eric Duncan. 26 year old Nina Pham was the first of the hospital’s staff to be diagnosed with the disease. Both of them have cared for Duncan, a 41 year old Liberian citizen, who has passed away in an isolation ward a little over one week ago. Amber Vinson was transferred to the Atlanta special facility by air ambulance on Wednesday.
The second infection of a hospital worker at the Texas Presbyterian called into question the hospital’s ability to properly protect its workers from getting infected with Ebola. and raised concerns about the quality of the facility’s initial response to Duncan’s diagnosis by federal and state agencies. A CDC official has declared that Vinson should not have been allowed to travel at all, and has assured the public that from this moment on no person under monitoring for exposure to the virus will be allowed to travel in any other way than controlled movement.