By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Oct. 23, 2014 (HealthDay News) — New York City health officials said Thursday that a health care worker who recently returned from West Africa has tested positive for Ebola.
The patient, identified as Dr. Craig Spencer by city officials, had been working with Doctors Without Borders helping to treat Ebola patients in Guinea, one of three countries hit hard by the disease, The New York Times reported.
According to the Times, a city official said Spencer returned to New York City on Oct. 14, and by 11 a.m. Thursday morning he had developed a 103-degree fever. He immediately alerted Doctors Without Borders. Emergency medical workers in full personal protective gear transported him from his Manhattan apartment to Bellevue Hospital, where he has been since 1 p.m.
In a statement, New York City Health Department Commissioner Mary Bassett said Spencer arrived at the hospital with “a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms,” and had traveled from West Africa within the 21-day window of incubation for the Ebola virus.
According to the Times, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already dispatched a team of experts to help with the case.
New York health officials also said that they immediately began to actively trace all of the patient’s contacts, and would quarantine anyone they thought might be at risk, the Times reported. Spencer had traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the subway on Wednesday night, when he went to a bowling alley and then took a taxi home, the newspaper said.
According to the Times, Spencer is a fellow of international emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and an instructor in clinical medicine at Columbia University.
In other news, Amber Vinson, one of two nurses battling Ebola after contracting it from a patient at a Dallas hospital, is now free of the virus, according to a statement released by her family on Wednesday.
“We are overjoyed to announce that, as of yesterday [Tuesday] evening, officials at Emory University Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control are no longer able to detect virus in her body,” Vinson’s family said in the statement, ABC News reported.
The statement added that Vinson should be able to leave the isolation unit.
The other nurse, Nina Pham, is being treated at the U.S. National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md.; her condition was upgraded from fair to good on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Dallas health officials said that Pham’s pet dog Bentley, a spaniel, tested negative for Ebola, NBC News reported.
Both Vinson and Pham became infected with the Ebola virus while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Duncan, a Liberian national, was the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed on American soil. He died of the illness on Oct. 8
Also, Ashoka Mukpo, 33, the freelance cameraman who was diagnosed with Ebola while working for NBC News in Liberia has cleared the virus from his system. He has since left the special isolation unit at Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where he had been treated for the past two weeks, the hospital said Tuesday.
Mukpo is one of eight Americans who have been diagnosed with the often deadly virus that has been plaguing three West African nations — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — since the spring.
Meanwhile, U.S. health officials this week tightened guidelines for health care workers treating Ebola patients.
The new recommendations call for full-body suits and hoods with no skin exposure and use of a respirator at all times. There will also be stricter rules for removing equipment and disinfecting hands, and the designation of a “site manager” to supervise the putting on and taking off of equipment used while treating a patient.
The revised guidelines are apparently in response to the two nurses in Dallas who became infected with Ebola while treating Duncan.
Health officials aren’t sure how the nurses became infected with Ebola.
But, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that the nurses caring for Duncan had some of their skin exposed.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed nearly 4,900 people out of nearly 10,000 reported cases, according to the World Health Organization.
More information
For more on Ebola, visit the World Health Organization.
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