The first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States was fighting for his life at a Dallas hospital yesterday and appeared not to be receiving any of the experimental medicines for the virus, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Thomas Eric Duncan became ill after arriving in the Texas city from Liberia two weeks ago, heightening concerns that the worst Ebola epidemic on record could spread from West Africa, where it began in March. The hemorrhagic fever has killed at least 3,400 people out of at least 7,490 probable, suspected and confirmed cases.
“The man in Dallas, who is fighting for his life, is the only patient to develop Ebola in the United States,” CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
In a media briefing with reporters on Sunday, Frieden said he was scheduled to brief President Barack Obama today.
He said doses of the experimental medicine ZMapp were “all gone” and the drug is “not going to be available anytime soon.”
A second experimental drug can be “difficult to use and can actually make someone sicker,” he said.
Frieden said the doctor and the patient’s family would decide whether to use the drug, but if “they wanted to, they would have access to it.”
“As far as we understand, experimental medicine is not being used,” Frieden said. “It’s really up to his treating physicians, himself, his family what treatment to take.”
Duncan remained in critical condition, Wendell Watson, spokesman for Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, said on Sunday.
Texas law enforcement officials were also seeking a “low- risk” man who was one of 38 people who had potentially had contact with Duncan, health officials told the media briefing. The man had tested negative for fever on Saturday, but officials said they wanted to continue to monitor him.
At Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, parishioners prayed for Duncan, congregation member Louise Troh – who is quarantined because of her close contact with Duncan – and both of their families.
“Although this disease has become personal to us, we realize we’re not the first to know its devastation, and we are not the ones most desperately affected,” Associate Pastor Mark Wingfeld told the church audience.
He encouraged parishioners to focus not only on the Dallas family but also on those in West Africa stricken with Ebola.
In Nebraska, another hospital was preparing for the arrival of an Ebola patient who contracted the virus in Liberia, a spokesman said on Sunday.
Nebraska Medical Center spokesman Taylor Wilson would only identify the patient as a male U.S. citizen expected to arrive on Monday. But the father of Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman working for NBC News who contracted Ebola in Liberia, told Reuters on Friday that his son was going to Nebraska for treatment.
Duncan’s case has highlighted problems that American public health officials are trying furiously to address: The Dallas hospital that admitted him initially did not recognize the deadly disease and sent him home with antibiotics, only for him to return two days later in an ambulance.
“The issue of the missed diagnosis initially is concerning,” Frieden said, adding that public health officials had redoubled their efforts to raise awareness of the disease.
“We’re seeing more people calling us, considering the possibility of Ebola – that’s what we want to see,” he said on CNN. “We don’t want people not to be diagnosed.”
Frieden said he was confident the disease would not spread widely within the United States. U.S. officials are also scaling up their response in West Africa, where Ebola presents an enormous challenge, he added.
“But it’s going to take time,” Frieden said. “The virus is spreading so fast that it’s hard to keep up.”
When asked on Sunday if the United States should suspend flights to and from affected countries or impose a visa ban on travelers from those countries, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said “absolutely not.”
“When you start closing off countries like that, there is a real danger of making things worse,” Fauci said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“You can cause unrest in the country,” he said. “It’s conceivable that governments could fall if you just isolate them completely.”
The CDC has identified 10 people who had direct contact with Duncan as being at greatest risk of infection. Another 38 were being monitored as potential contacts, out of 114 people initially evaluated for exposure risks. None from either group has shown symptoms, Frieden said.
At Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, where Louise Troh, the quarantined girlfriend of the first patient in the United States diagnosed with Ebola, is a member of the congregation, greeters passed out bulletins and shook hands at the church entrances. Members hugged one another in greeting shortly before the service began. A couple hundred people sat in the pews of the church and began to pray for the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, and for Troh and both of their families.
Associate Pastor Mark Wingfeld led the opening prayer and encouraged members not only to focus on the family in Dallas but also on those stricken with the deadly virus in West Africa who don’t have the same access to medical care.
“Although this disease has become personal to us, we realise we’re not the first to know its devastation and we are not the ones most desperately affected,” Wingfeld told parishioners.
“We pray that you calm the anxious hearts of so many in our city. Help the ignorant understand the truth.”
Parishioners were told by church officials earlier in the week that neither Troh nor any of her family members had attended services since Duncan’s arrival so there was no chance of exposure within the congregation.
Medical authorities have identified 10 people who had direct contact with Duncan as being at greatest risk of infection. Troh, whom Duncan has been staying with since he arrived on a visit from West Africa, is one of them.
“Whether there had been contact or not, maybe we would be acting differently, but I’d like to think we wouldn’t,” Julie Sorrels, 33, said.
Some African immigrants in Dallas are worried that the case of a Liberian man who is sick with the Ebola virus in a city hospital is generating ill-feeling, including some taunts and finger-pointing, toward the wider community.
“Some people around here see us as bringing the disease and that’s just not right,” said a Liberian who asked to be called Sekou.
Some African immigrants in Dallas, while saying they are thankful to the United States and its people for taking them in, say handshakes are fewer and curious glances more frequent since Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to hospital last month with Ebola. His was the first diagnosed case of the disease in the United States.
Duncan, who was visiting from Liberia when he fell ill, was staying in the melting-pot neighborhood of Vickery Meadow, home to about 25,000 people who speak more than 30 languages.
The Dallas case has put authorities and the public on alert over concerns that the Ebola epidemic could spread from West Africa, where it began in March and where it has killed more than 3,400 people. The epidemic has hit hardest in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Some immigrants from Somalia wearing traditional clothing that includes headscarves for women, say they have seen fingers pointed their way on the neighbourhood streets.
“People are looking at us in a bad way. We didn’t have anything to do with this. Somalia does not have Ebola. It is on the other side of Africa,” said Shadiya Abdi, 27, an immigrant from Somalia.
At schools in Vickery Park, where five students who came in close contact with Duncan have temporarily stopped attending school, some of the other children of African immigrants have been branded ‘Ebola kids’,” said local politician Eric Williams.
In downtown Dallas, near where tourists gather at the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, an Ethiopian parking lot attendant who gave his name only as Ayob said a few people have started to see him as an object of suspicion.
There were nearly 2 million people in the United States who came from sub-Saharan Africa, according to 2010 U.S. Census data.
