DEVELOPMENTS
DO NOT USE THE FIRST ITEM IF USING EBOLA NURSE SIDEBAR
• Kaci Hickox, a nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, said Wednesday she will leave voluntary quarantine in the Maine home of her boyfriend today, though the state wants her to remain until Nov. 10. She said she was “appalled” by the expectation that she would keep herself in isolation, despite showing no symptoms of the disease. The state said it would seek a court order to require she remain in quarantine.
• A nurse agreed to quarantine herself in her Texas home after she returned from working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone on Wednesday, according to the governor’s office. The nurse, who was not identified, does not show signs of symptoms, but she is at risk under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocols, a news release said.
• The rate of new Ebola infections in Liberia appears to be declining and could represent a genuine trend, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, but the epidemic is far from over. The disease is still raging in parts of Sierra Leone and there is still a risk that the decline in Liberia won’t be sustained, Dr. Bruce Aylward, an assistant director-general for WHO, warned. But there are positive signs: Some beds in treatment centers in Liberia are empty and the number of burials is down.
— From news services
Seeming to contradict the White House, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered firm restrictions for U.S. troops returning from West Africa, saying the military men and women helping fight Ebola must undergo 21-day quarantines.
President Barack Obama has pushed back against states, most notably New Jersey and New York, that have ordered mandatory quarantines for people arriving from the region, which is the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak, whether or not they show signs of infection. He says he is concerned that ordering them into isolation, rather than following a federal recommendation of monitoring for symptoms, will discourage volunteer health care workers from answering the call to come to West Africa and help fight the disease.
“We can’t hermetically seal ourselves off,” he declared as he met Wednesday with health care workers at the White House.
“We need to call them what they are, which is American heroes,” he added. “They deserve our gratitude, and they deserve to be treated with dignity and with respect.”
However, he has said he believes the military’s situation is different because the soldiers are under orders, rather than volunteering to go to Africa.
“It’s part of their mission that’s been assigned to them by their commanders and ultimately by me, the commander-in-chief,” USA Today quoted him as saying.
Hagel’s restrictive policy for U.S. troops was a response to a recommendation sent to him Tuesday by Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on behalf of the heads of each of the military services.
In his memo to Hagel, Dempsey said the military chiefs felt compelled to take greater precautions in light of “recent uncertainty surrounding domestic Ebola cases.” He cited growing concern among military families and their neighbors.
“As we order our young men and women forward to execute this important mission, we owe it to them, their families, and their communities to take these prudent measures to ensure that should a member return with Ebola, we will prevent further transmission of the virus,” Dempsey wrote.
Announcing his decision in Washington, Hagel said, “This is also a policy that was discussed in great detail by the communities, by the families of our military men and women, and they very much wanted a safety valve on this.”
As originally envisioned, Pentagon policy called for troops returning to their home bases from Ebola response missions to undergo temperature checks twice a day for 21 days to ensure they were free of symptoms and to refrain from traveling widely during that period. But they were not to be quarantined.
The Army, however, acting on its own this week, put under quarantine in Italy the first group to return from West Africa after Ebola duty, including a two-star general.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told U.S. News & World Report that he believes Hagel and the governors who have imposed quarantines are “pandering in the face of Ebola” and doing more harm than good.
But Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said Hagel had made “the right call.”
“Here the secretary is acting not only to protect our forces but the larger military family,” he told The Hill.
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