Participants wear protective clothing and equipment during training for the Ebola response team at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.  REUTERS
 
Reuters/New York

A medical worker quarantined in New Jersey on her return from treating Ebola victims in West Africa was being evaluated in a hospital isolation ward on Saturday after new contagion-control safeguards were imposed for America's biggest urban center.
She was the first to be quarantined under a policy imposed on Friday by the states of New York and New Jersey requiring all health workers coming from Ebola-stricken West African countries to be automatically confined for monitoring during the 21-day incubation period of the virus.
The worker, who has not been publicly identified, showed no symptoms when she arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday but developed a fever after being admitted to University Hospital in Newark, the state health department said.
Fever can be an early sign of the disease, which is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who is exhibiting symptoms. No other details about her background or condition were given, but a department statement said she was "in isolation and being evaluated".
New York and New Jersey officials acted to begin mandatory     isolation of medical personnel arriving from Ebola zones after Craig Spencer, a doctor who treated patients in Guinea for a month, came back to New York City infected.
The new measures apply to two airports serving the greater New York City metropolitan area - John F. Kennedy International in New York and Newark Liberty in New Jersey. They are among five airports through which the federal government has recently ordered all U.S.-bound travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea funneled for special Ebola screening.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record has killed at least 4,800 people since March, mostly in those three West African nations, and perhaps as many as 15,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Only four Ebola patients have been diagnosed so far in the United States: Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who died on Oct. 8 at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, two nurses who treated him there; and Spencer, the first New York City case.
President Barack Obama has so far resisted calls by some politicians to institute a U.S. ban on travel to and from West Africa.
But expanding mandatory quarantines to healthcare workers arriving through all five designated U.S. airports is an option under consideration by the administration, Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Reuters.

 

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