Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden said Sunday that a breach of care protocol caused a Texas health care worker who treated the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S. to contract the disease.
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The worker, a nurse who has not yet been identified, helped to treat Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas on Duncan’s second visit to the facility. The worker’s positive test results were confirmed Sunday, and the case is the first known person-to-person transmission of Ebola in the U.S.
“We’re deeply concerned,” Freiden said.
National Nurses United Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro released a statement Sunday saying the report only “heightens the concerns for registered nurses and other frontline hospital personnel who would be among the first to respond and interact with other patients about whether their hospital is doing enough to protect health workers as well as patients and the general public.”
“The time to act is long overdue,” DeMoro said. According to the White House, President Obama received an update from his homeland security assistant, as well as the Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, and is demanding immediate federal action. Along with an order for federal authorities to take additional steps to “ensure hospitals and health care providers are prepared to follow protocols,” a readout from the White House shows an order for the CDC investigation into the protocol to move as “expeditiously as possible,” and that information out of the investigation be shared “quickly and broadly.”
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