Fears are growing in the United States about Ebola with about 200 airline cabin cleaners walking off the job in New York and some lawmakers demanding the government ban travelers from the West African countries hit hardest by the virus.
“The nation is frightened, and people are frightened of this disease,” the US cabinet secretary for health, Sylvia Burwell, said on Thursday, a day after the death in Texas of the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Burwell told a news conference that people were frightened because Ebola “has a very high mortality rate. They are frightened because they need to learn and understand what the facts are about that disease.”
As the government prepares to start screening passengers from West Africa for fever at five major airports over the next week, cleaners at New York’s LaGuardia Airport staged a one-day work stoppage over what they say is insufficient protection for workers whose jobs include cleaning up vomit and bathrooms. The cleaners will return to work Thursday night.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said the goal was to expand airport screenings for Ebola internationally to “as many different checkpoints as possible.”
The Ebola virus causes hemorrhagic fever and is spread through direct contact with body fluids from an infected person, who would suffer severe bouts of vomiting and diarrhea.
“We are always with feces and near garbage,” Sharekul Islam, 20, whose job cleaning airplane cabins at New York’s John F Kennedy airport regularly exposes him to the type of waste and fluids that can transmit Ebola.
Twenty-three Republican and three Democratic members of the US House of Representatives signed a letter to President Barack Obama asking the State Department to impose a travel ban and restrict visas issued to citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The October 8-dated letter also asked US health and border control officials to consider quarantine of 21 days for anyone who arrives from the affected nations after being exposed to Ebola, the period in which they would show signs of illness.
It said the World Health Organisation “is an organisation of unelected bureaucrats and political appointees of foreign countries. It has no duty to protect the lives and well-being of Americans, as you do.”
WHO says nearly 4,000 people have died in the worst Ebola outbreak on record, with a death toll averaging about 50 percent of cases since March. An unrelated outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed dozens.
Shares in Lakeland Industries, a maker of suits to wear while handling hazardous materials, rose more than 50 percent on Thursday on expectations of the disease spreading.
A Liberian man who flew on commercial flights from his home country on Sept. 19 and died in Dallas, Texas on Wednesday morning had had contact in Liberia with a woman who later died of the disease.
In other examples of the concern over Ebola, a sheriff’s deputy was admitted to hospital Wednesday after saying he may have been exposed to the Liberian man. The deputy tested negative for Ebola, the state health department said.
And on Wednesday, jail officials in Kenosha County, Wisconsin moved a female Immigration Customs Enforcement detainee into medical isolation after learning she was from Liberia, and despite her showing no symptoms of the virus, the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.
Her temperature was taken twice and she was monitored by nurses, the department said.
Separately in Washington, a Republican in the US Senate is still holding up most of $750 million from the Defense Department’s request to shift $1 billion in war funds to fight Ebola. Senator James Inhofe’s approval as the top Republican on the Senate Armed Forces Committee is needed, although other senior Republicans said they backed the funds.
US health officials, while answering questions about mistakes in the treatment of Liberian man Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas and overall preparedness for Ebola patients, have emphasized the need to tackle the virus at its source in West Africa.
“This is a fluid and heterogeneous epidemic. It is changing quickly and it’s going to be a long fight,” Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday at a high-level meeting of major donors at the World Bank. Frieden compared Ebola to AIDS and said, “Speed is the most important variable here. This is controllable and this was preventable.”
Spain seeks answers as seven more enter Ebola isolation
Meanwhile, seven people turned themselves in late on Thursday to an Ebola isolation unit in Madrid where Teresa Romero, the nurse who became the first person to contract Ebola outside Africa, lay gravely ill.
Alarm about Ebola’s spread around Europe grew yesterday as Macedonia said it was checking for the virus in a British man who died within hours of being admitted to hospital in the capital Skopje on Thursday. A Prague hospital was testing a 56-year-old Czech man with symptoms of the virus.
In Spain, recriminations mounted over Romero, who was infected in hospital as she treated two Spanish missionaries who had caught the haemorrhagic fever in West Africa -- where Ebola has already killed around 4,000 people -- and remained undiagnosed for days despite reporting her symptoms.
The seven new admissions included two hairdressers who had given Romero a beauty treatment before she was diagnosed with Ebola, and hospital staff who had treated the 44-year-old nurse. The Carlos III hospital said they had all turned themselves in voluntarily to be monitored for signs of the disease.
A hospital spokeswoman said there were now 14 people in the isolation unit on its sealed-off sixth floor, including Romero, her husband, and health workers who had cared for Romero since she was admitted on Monday.
None had so far tested positive for the disease except Romero, whose condition was described by the hospital as serious but stable.
Pointing the finger
The Ebola virus causes fever, vomiting and diarrhoea and sometimes internal bleeding, and is spread through direct contact with body fluids. About half of those infected in West Africa have died.
Spanish labour unions accused the government of seeking to deflect the blame onto Romero for the failings of its health system, after the European Union asked Spain to explain how the virus could have been spread on a high-security ward.
The top regional health official in Madrid, Javier Rodriguez, has said Romero took too long to admit she had made a mistake by touching her face with the glove of her protective suit while taking it off.
“She has taken days to recognise that she may have made a mistake when taking off the suit. If she had said it earlier, it would have saved a lot of work,” he said in a radio interview.
El Mundo newspaper on Friday published a cartoon showing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and other officials of the ruling People’s Party pointing at the nurse under the caption: “Protocol for passing on blame.”
“They will find any way to blame her,” Romero’s brother, Jose Ramon, told the daily El Pais. “Basically, my sister did her job ... and she has become infected with Ebola.”
One union representative said on Friday that health workers from doctors to ambulance drivers were worried about their lack of training in how to deal with Ebola patients.
“Finding staff to work voluntarily (in the isolation unit) is very difficult,” said Jose Manuel Freire, spokesman for a health workers’ union.