The news about five children of school age coming in contact with Thomas Duncan, the first confirmed Ebola patient on American soil, have left hundreds or thousands of parents in Dallas concerned about and frightened of the deadly disease. According to sources cited by the New York Times, the attendance at local schools is below normal.
Thomas E. Duncan has come in contact with five children before he started showing symptoms of the disease. One of them is attending high school, another one middle school, and two of them are in two different elementary schools. The children suspected of having contact with Duncan over the weekend when he was already possibly contagious have attended school on the following Monday. They are now kept at home, under daily monitoring from health care professionals. None of them show any symptoms of the disease, and the chances for them to have passed on the dangerous virus to another person at school are very slim.
Even if there is no serious reason to be concerned about a possible infection, several parents have decided to play it safe and kept their children home on Wednesday. Many others have accepted the reassurances of health care officials, and let their offspring go to school – but recommended them to keep their distance from others and avoid contact in any form. According to Mike Miles, the superintendent of the Dallas school system, the attendance at local schools was down a bit, to 86% of normal, compared to the usual 95%.
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The common symptoms of Ebola are fatigue, fever, headaches, joint, muscle and abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and loss of appetite. Before these symptoms appear, the person is usually not contagious, and even after they start showing, contracting the virus is only possible through direct contact with the infected person’s bodily fluids. The incubation period of the disease is typically 8 to 10 days, but it can vary between 2 and 21 days.