Written by Alisha Klug, Media by Jack Wang
[divide]
It was announced on Wednesday, October 15 that a second nurse from Dallas has been infected with Ebola. The currently anonymous health care provider went to the hospital with a fever the day after she flew back to Dallas from Cleveland. This nurse was not the first in the hospital to have caught the virus. Nurse Nina Pham, who had also been on the team who had cared for Duncan, contracted the virus a while back.
Because the hospital had no idea how Nina Pham had been infected despite her protective gear, all of the people on the team have been under close surveillance by the CDC (Center of Disease Control and prevention). Despite regulations that go against it, the second nurse travelled by airplane from Cleveland to Dallas a day before she went to the hospital with a fever. Why she was allowed to do this is unclear, however, according to ABC News, the CDC promises to do all they can to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again.
The 75 people who were on the plane with the nurse are currently being tracked down and put under surveillance. Health experts are saying that it is highly unlikely that a fellow passenger somehow caught the virus, but they are taking precautions to be safe. Of course, how long this will take is unknown. Since the breakout, the nurse has been transferred from Dallas to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. This hospital has successfully treated victims of Ebola before. Some say that this is a sign that the nurse or her family doesn’t really trust the hospital in Dallas due to its failure to keep Duncan alive. Furthermore, the co-workers of these two nurses say that the protocol and procedures to protect the health care workers from getting Ebola were unclear and inadequate. Apparently, they worked for days without proper protective gear, leaving them open to infection. It is possible that lack of planning is what caused these women to become ill.
In conclusion, because this is the second case within the staff of the hospital in Dallas, authorities say that it will probably not be the last one. However, the doctors seem to be confident that they will be able to control the virus and those things will get better soon.