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DW
An EU official has said that the bloc needs to drastically increase the resources it is putting into the battle against the Ebola outbreak. Meanwhile, the UN has warned against quarantining people for no good reason.Christos Stylianides, who was appointed by the European Union last week to lead the fight against Ebola in West Africa, said in Brussels on Monday that the 28-member bloc needed to increase the number of hospital beds dedicated to fighting the outbreak to 5,000 from the current 1,000. This, he said, would require tens of thousands of more health workers.
"Every bed requires eight health and support staff. This means we need to mobilize immediately at least 40,000 staff," he said.
In a speech to the Emergency Response Coordination Center in Brussels, Stylianedes said he intended to travel to West Africa shortly after he takes up his post as European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management at the start of next month.
Reuters
The U.S. military was isolating personnel returning from their mission to help West African countries curb Ebola even though they showed no sign of infection and a nurse who treated patients in Sierra Leone was released on Monday to go to her home state after New Jersey forced her into quarantine.The decision by the Pentagon goes well beyond previously established military protocols and came just as the White House pushed to roll back steps by U.S. states to quarantine healthcare workers returning from the three countries at the center of the Ebola epidemic even if they were asymptomatic.
The U.S. Army has already isolated about a dozen soldiers at part of a U.S. base in Vicenza, Italy, including Major General Darryl Williams, who oversaw the initial response to the Ebola outbreak, the worst on record with nearly 5,000 dead.
NPR
Kaci Hickox, the nurse who spent the weekend in mandatory quarantine after arriving in New Jersey from West Africa, will be discharged from the hospital and allowed to leave the state, officials said today, citing tests that have shown she's been free of any Ebola symptoms for the past 24 hours.The move could allow Hickox, a Texas native, to travel to Maine, where she currently lives.
A Doctors Without Borders worker who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, Hickox has been under close monitoring in an isolation tent since Friday, when officials found she had a fever. After a preliminary blood test found she didn't have Ebola early Saturday, Hickox hired a civil rights lawyer to work for her release.
New Jersey's health department issued a statement this morning, reading in part:
"After consulting with her, she has requested transport to Maine, and that transport will be arranged via a private carrier not via mass transit or commercial aircraft. She will remain subject to New Jersey's mandatory quarantine order while in New Jersey. Health officials in Maine have been notified of her arrangements and will make a determination under their own laws on her treatment when she arrives."
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Charlotte, N.C., merchant Tonieh Ross says her heart cries for the orphaned children back home in Liberia who aren’t getting the hugs they so need, for fear of the deadly Ebola virus.Ross, the owner of the Virtuous D Boutique, also frets about her younger sister in Monrovia, Eugenia, whose paycheck disappeared when her employer shuttered his business and left the disease-ravaged country. Now Eugenia is among some 20 desperate Liberians, mostly children, phoning Ross “over and over and over until something happens”– that is, until she or her friends send money or food, she said.
Reuters
Federal health officials on Monday called for voluntary home quarantine for people at the highest risk for Ebola infection but said most medical workers returning from West Africa would require daily monitoring without isolation.The announcement by Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ran counter to the mandatory quarantines being imposed on returning doctors and nurses by a handful of states including New York and New Jersey.
In addition, the U.S. military said it was isolating troops returning from their mission to help West African countries curb Ebola even though they showed no sign of infection, while a nurse who treated patients in Sierra Leone was released to go to her home state after New Jersey had forced her into quarantine.
Frieden said high-risk people include healthcare workers who suffer a needle stick while caring for an Ebola patient or who tend to a patient without protective gear.
NY Times
Even as New Jersey officials on Monday released a nurse they had kept quarantined in a tent since her return from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, an unapologetic Gov. Chris Christie dismissed those who questioned his handling of the case and denied that he had reversed himself.The nurse, Kaci Hickox, 33, who had previously been working with Doctors Without Borders, became the first public test case for a mandatory quarantine that both Mr. Christie and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Friday.
One of Ms. Hickox’s lawyers, Steven Hyman, said she had been released midday from University Hospital in Newark. A hospital spokeswoman said that two black S.U.V.s with tinted windows were headed to Maine, with the patient as a passenger in one. The spokeswoman, Stacie Newton, declined to say where in Maine the convoy was going, or whose vehicles they were.