SOURCE FNurse released in New Jersey; boy under Ebola evaluation in New YorkByAshley Fantz,CNNupdated 4:27 PM EDT, Mon October 27, 2014STORY HIGHLIGHTS Kaci Hickox is released from New Jersey hospital after testing negative for Ebola A 5-year-old boy is being tested for Ebola in New York, an official says Maryland to monitor the health of travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea N.Y., N.J. implemented 21-day quarantine on workers who treated Ebola patients(CNN)-- A nurse who was quarantined at a hospital in New Jersey after returning from West Africa was released Monday, her attorney said.Kaci Hickox, who told CNN the quarantine was violating her rights, was discharged after testing negative for Ebola.Also on Monday, a 5-year-old boy who recently visited West Africa and has a fever was being tested for the virus in New York.The boy, who was running a temperature, is with his mother at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center, said Dr. Ram Raju, president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., which oversees Bellevue.The boy's test results should be available within 12 hours, and officials are trying to find out whether the child, who returned with his family recently from West Africa, came into contact with anyone who has Ebola, Raju said.Quarantined nurse to be dischargedPhotos: The Ebola epidemicCDC releases new Ebola worker guidelinesEbola's ground zero still strugglingNurse to return to MaineHickox was put in isolation Friday after returning to New Jersey from a month in Sierra Leone.Her quarantine, part of a days-old policy the governors of New York and New Jersey instituted for all health care workers who've had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa, has been criticized widely by health care experts.On Sunday, she spoke by phone with CNN's Candy Crowley and Elizabeth Cohen."This is an extreme that is really unacceptable, and I feel like my basic human rights have been violated," Hickox said. She said she was flummoxed as to how New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has no medical training, could describe her as "obviously ill."Hickox will return to Maine, and arrangements for her travel are still being worked out, her attorney, Stephen Hyman, told CNN."Her first priority is to get out of the hospital and back to a normal life," he said.Hyman said there's a "legal basis" to challenge the quarantine policies in New Jersey and in New York, but the nurse isn't sure she wants to do so.Each state has a different quarantine law, said Steven Gravely, an attorney who helped rewrite Virginia's quarantine law so the state could more easily respond to outbreaks.The U.S. Constitution gives states authority over how to approach health matters, though the federal government has control over what happens concerning public health in airports and shipping ports, Gravely said.Mandatory quarantines -- now what?What states are doingLast week, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, said that active 21-day monitoring would begin Monday in the six states where about 70% of air travelers enter the United States from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, hard-hit countries in West Africa. Those states are New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia.The three-week period marks the maximum incubation time forEbola.State and local officials will maintain daily contact with all travelers from the three affected countries for the entire 21 days after the last possible date of exposure to Ebola virus, Frieden said.Authorities will require travelers to report their temperatures and the presence or absence of Ebola symptoms aside from a fever, he explained, and they will be required to coordinate with public health officials if they intend to travel and to make arrangements to have their temperatures monitored during travel in a manner acceptable to state and local health officials.Relatives afraid to take in Ebola orphansPentagon may quarantine Ebola troopRead Frieden's full remarksNew York, New Jersey and Illinois say anyone returning from having direct contact with Ebola patients in West Africa will have to be quarantined for 21 days.Maryland officials will monitor the health of all travelers returning from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Gov. Martin O'Malley's office said. The effort will build on state and local health departments' outreach and monitoring,according to a statementthat explains more about the process. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn's office said the quarantine would be a "home quarantine.""This protective measure is too important to be voluntary," Quinn said.On Friday, Cuomo and Christie announced a mandatory quarantine for people who had been in West Africa and had contact there with people infected with Ebola. Christie said such returning health care workers who are New Jersey residents could be quarantined in their homes as long as they did not have symptoms consistent with Ebola.Christie said Monday that he was glad that Hickox had been released from quarantine."The reason she was put in the hospital in the first place was because she was running a high fever and was symptomatic. If you live in New Jersey, you're quarantined in your home. That's always been the policy. If you live outside the state, and you're symptomatic, we're not letting you go onto public transportation. It makes no common sense. The minute she was no longer symptomatic, she was released."Virginia is implementing an "active monitoring program" for all returning passengers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, "with a special emphasis on returning health care workers," Virginia governor's spokesman Brian Coy has said.Should health care workers be quarantined?Could quarantines backfire?Arguments against the quarantines are that they could deter health care workers from traveling to West Africa to fight Ebola and could greatly hurt their livelihoods."I'm concerned of the disincentive for the health care workers" to travel to West Africa, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health."If I lose three weeks on my return and don't get to do the work I'm supposed to do ... means this wouldn't be workable for me," said Dr. John Carlson, a pediatric immunologist at Tulane University.Frieden has long argued against travel restrictions, saying they could hurt the global health community's effort to tamp down the West Africa outbreak. "It makes it hard to get health workers in, because they can't get out," he has said.An expert who has studied Ebola for more than a decade, Purdue University's David Sanders, told CNN on Monday that he feels the policy on mandatory quarantines in New York and New Jersey are "largely political" rather than medical fact and that leaders are acting based on the desire to calm a panicked public rather than to do what's most beneficial.Doctors Without Borders was even more direct."Forced quarantine of asymptomatic health workers returning from fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not grounded on scientific evidence and could undermine efforts to curb the epidemic at its source," the group said.Doctor with Ebola at BellevueBellevue Hospital Center is also where Ebola-positive New York doctor Craig Spencer, 33, is in isolation. He is in serious but stable condition Monday, according to Raju.Spencer arrived home in the United States on October 17 after spending time in Guinea.Because he'd had contact with Ebola patients, Spencer took pains to limit his interaction with others, but he did go places and spend time with friends.Spencer's fiancee, Morgan Dixon, had been under quarantine at Bellevue, but doctors said she did not have the virus and has no symptoms, said Jean Weinberg, the city Health Department spokeswoman."We learned a lot from Dallas," Raju said, referring to all that went wrong in Texas when a Liberian national arrived from West Africa with Ebola and two nurses treating him contracted the virus.How the Ebola virus spreadsEbola and the U.S. militaryOn Sunday, the Pentagon would not say whether it's willing to still send an active-duty militaryEbola response teamto states ordering mandatory quarantine for Ebola health care workers.The 30-person team finishes training Monday and will then be ready for deployment on 72 hours' notice. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would have to approve any deployment.On Monday, CNN learned from military officials that Army Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, who's commander of U.S. Army Africa, and about 10 other personnel are now in "controlled monitoring" in Italy after landing there following a West Africa trip over the weekend.Italian authorities met Williams' plane "in full CDC gear," an official said, referring to the type of protective equipment health care workers wear when dealing with Ebola.There is no indication that any team members have the virus.They will be monitored for 21 days at a separate location at a U.S. military installation in Vicenza, Italy, according to military officials. It's not yet clear if family members can visit them.CNN's Ralph Ellis, Elizabeth Cohen, Joshua Berlinger, Joe Sutton, Daniel Burke,Greg Botelho, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Poppy Harlow, Haimy Assefa, Kristina Sgueglia, David Shortell, Barbara Starr and Josh Levs contributed to this report.

SOURCE GCDC Chief Announces New Shift in Ebola ProtocolsbyBILL CHAPPELLOctober 27, 20145:00 PM ET

Members of a cleaning crew wearing personal protective equipment push a barrel to be loaded in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention truck on Friday after cleaning the New York apartment of Dr. Craig Spencer, who has been diagnosed with Ebola.In the latest tweak to America's plan to prevent the spread of the deadly Ebola disease, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leader Dr. Tom Frieden announced changes to the U.S. response to Ebola and the guidance federal agencies are giving to state and local governments.The new protocol stops short of the mandatory 21-day quarantines that some states have begun requiring. Instead, Frieden said, it relies on individual assessment and close monitoring. He also detailed several categories of risk among both airline passengers and the medical volunteers who he said have been doing "heroic work" in West Africa."High risk" individuals, Frieden said, include those who have cared for an Ebola patient and were accidentally poked by a needle or lacked protective gear. Those people, Frieden said, should isolate themselves in their homes and avoid all forms of mass transit and large gatherings.Those in the group would also undergo "direct active monitoring," in which a medical worker watches as the person's temperature is taken and speaks with him regularly about his condition.The "some risk" category, Frieden said, includes those who have lived in the same household as an Ebola patient but haven't had direct contact with him, as well as health care workers who have cared for patients without any equipment problems. He stressed that it would be dangerous to treat such medical workers as "pariahs," as it might discourage staff who are trying to prevent the disease's spread.Frieden also gave more details about people who enter the U.S. after being in countries where the outbreak poses the greatest threat.Each day, slightly fewer than 100 people travel to the U.S. from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, he said, citing the airport-arrivals screening program that began this month. Most of those travelers, he added, are either U.S. citizens or legal residents. Of more than 807 people who have been evaluated, Frieden said, 46 of them are health workers.The CDC chief noted that Monday marks the start of an increase in post-arrival monitoring that his agency recommended last week for incoming passengers. That program covers six states (New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia) where the CDC says some 70 percent of incoming travelers are headed after landing in the U.S.Frieden opened his remarks by citing previous scientific studies about the disease, saying that they had proven the disease is transmissible only via direct contact with an infected person's bodily fluids."At CDC, we base our decisions on science and experience," he said.Frieden spoke after a weekend in which a new public debate erupted over how to treat returning American health workers who have volunteered to fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.Earlier Monday, New Jersey officials said they would allowKaci Hickox, a Texas-born nurse based in Maine, to leave the hospital where she's been under a mandatory quarantine since she arrived at Newark's airport from Sierra Leone Friday.Hickox landed as New Jersey, New York and Illinois were installing new policies requiring a 21-day quarantine for anyone who had potential contact with Ebola patients in West Africa. Hickox has maintained that she hasn't had any symptoms of the disease, and a preliminary blood test was negative for the disease. On Sunday, shehired a civil rights attorneyto help secure her release.The nurse works with Doctors Without Borders, which issued a statement Monday saying, "Forced quarantine of asymptomatic health workers returning from fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not grounded on scientific evidence and could undermine efforts to curb the epidemic at its source."The agency also warned that if U.S. officials took such steps, they would likely be mirrored in other countries.The CDC has adjusted its guidelines several times in the past few weeks, as the U.S. has recorded its first case of a Ebola patient being treated domestically and its first death from the disease that has killed more than 4,900 people.Earlier this month, the agency issued new protocols for Ebola screeningat five U.S. airports: New York's JFK, New Jersey's Newark, Chicago's O'Hare, Virginia's Washington-Dulles and Atlanta's Hartsfield.SOURCE HTracking Ebola in the U.S.INFOGRAPHICHealthDiseaseHealthcareISSUE 5042Oct 20, 2014

With eight confirmed cases of the highly fatal Ebola virus in the U.S. and revelations that health care workers potentially exposed to it have traveled on passenger flights and cruise ships, fears that the disease will spread across the country have grown. Here is an up-to-date map that can help you track the proliferation of Ebola across the United States:1. Location where faith in the U.S. health systems preparedness passed away on Oct. 82. CDC headquarters: Researchers working around the clock on an experimental press statement3. Official CDC quarantine zone4. Airspace that plane carrying Ebola-infected nurse traveled cordoned off up to 38,000 feet5. Future location of Incineration Pit 17B6. Man lying about his travel history to get past customs screening7. Ebola czar Ron Klain carefully loading single bullet into revolver8. Mechanics working nonstop to tune up CDCs corpse bulldozers9. Byram, MS: Ebola virion chased out of town by angry mob10. Just enough Ebola serum for Sheldon Adelson, Richard Branson, Koch brothers, and their respective families11. Severely symptomatic man who thankfully only has highly fatal yellow fever12. Taylor Allderdice High School: Hasnt been cancelled yet or anything. Sucks.13. Newspaper with headline Ebola Outbreak Hits America! being blown along vacant Manhattan streets14. Site that will be referred to by the roving post-epidemic tribes as the darkness lands15. CEO of hazmat suit manufacturer Lakeland Industries going to sleep with huge smile on his face16. 1,000 more men, women, and children diagnosed with Ebola in West Africa (not pictured)

SOURCE IHealth Officials Release Chart Of Those Currently Monitored ForEbolaOctober 22, 2014 5:40 PMView Comments

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Follow CBSDFW.COM:Facebook|TwitterDALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) While the conditions of two North Texas nurses who contracted Ebola continue to improve, federal and local health officials say they continue to monitor dozens of other people who may have been exposed to the virus.On October 22 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined Dallas County and the City of Dallas to release an Ebola monitoring graph.Officials said their hope is for those in the public to have a better understanding of the number of private citizens and healthcare workers who are still in isolation or under surveillance.As of October 22, sixty-six people have completed their isolation and/or monitoring and 108 are still being actively monitored.Doctor Lyle Peterson, the Senior CDC official in Dallas, said, As the graph shows, the number of people at risk for contracting Ebola is decreasing each day. Although we are not out of the woods yet, it is very encouraging we have not seen any other cases.The graph also has a date progression, through November 6, that shows when surveillance will be complete.Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said, There are still more hurdles to overcome, but weve reached a significant milestone in this difficult journey.The mayor spent part of Wednesday afternoon on a conference call talking to other mayors across the country about the lessons learned since the Ebola virus presented in Dallas.(2014 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

SOURCE JWhere's the empathy for Ebola's African victims?ByJohn D. Sutter, CNNupdated 9:00 AM EDT, Mon October 20, 2014STORY HIGHLIGHTS The world's response to Ebola is its own tragedy, writes CNN's John Sutter He argues race and geography play a role in the inaction Kofi Annan: If Ebola hit another region, "it probably would have been handled very differently" (CNN)-- The world's response to Ebola is its own sort of tragedy.Two facts make the point clear:John D. Sutter-- The United Nations has asked for $1 billion to fight the spread of the virus. As of Friday, it had collectedonly $100,000-- or 0.01%. An additional $20 million has been pledged but not received, according to CNN Money. "We need to turn pledges into action," the U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon told reporters. "We need more doctors, nurses, equipment, treatment centers."-- Liberia, meanwhile, which is hardest hit by the virus,says it requires 2.4 million boxes of protective gloves -- and 85,000 body bags, to be able to fight the virus in the next six months. Currently, it only has 18,000 boxes of gloves andless than 5,000 body bags.Let that second number sink in.Eight-fivethousandbody bags needed.But what is actually-really-truly behind the lack of helpfulness on the part of the international community? If you listen to right-wing pundits in the United States, we should blame Obama -- who they say is having his "Katrina moment."Those jabs are fueled more by upcoming midterm elections than reality. And they won't likely be quieted by Obama's announcement on Friday that he hasappointed an "Ebola czar"to manage the U.S. response.The true devastation, however, has been unfolding in West Africa for months. And it's the subject of far less outrage in the United States.A more rational and deep-seated critique of the international community's relative inaction emerged in arecent BBC interviewwith Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, who is from Ghana."If the crisis had hit some other region," he's quoted as telling that news organization, "it probably would have been handled very differently."In fact when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe."It's hard not to agree that race and geography do play a role in the world's callousness. They help explain why "some other region" -- any other region, really -- would get more help.Science tells part of the story.There's evidence lighter skinned people have trouble "feeling" the pain of those with darker skin. Researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy,tested thisin by showing a group of Caucasian people video clips of people of various races being pricked with a needle. They monitored the viewers to see how their bodies responded to the sight of another person being hurt. The white viewers reacted more strongly -- or showed more physical empathy -- when white people were hurt than Africans.In another study, "researchers found that white participants, black participants, and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than whites,"Slate writes.Except for a handful of health workers, nearly all of Ebola's 4,400 casualties have been black Africans -- and these simmering biases are deeply troubling."Ebola is now a stand-in for any combination of 'African-ness', 'blackness', 'foreign-ness' and 'infestation' -- poised to ruin the perceived purity of Western borders and bodies," Hannah Giorgiswrote for The Guardian.There's a long, ugly history of this sort of thing.Consider the 1994 Rwanda genocide, or the HIV/AIDS epidemic."In the case of AIDS, it took years for proper research funding to be put in place and it was only when so-called 'innocent' groups were involved (women and children, haemophiliac patients and straight men) that the media, the politicians and the scientific community and funding bodies took notice," John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health,wrote for The Independent.The headline of his piece: "They'd find a cure if Ebola came to London."Maybe some blame should fall on geography, as well. Americans, in particular, know very little about Africa (just try this quiz on African geography from the Washington Post). The physical distance between Africa and North America or Europe -- two global centers of financial and political power -- also could lead people to feel emotionally distant from the crisis."I don't know about racism, but I do know when (Ebola) was only in Africa, hardly anyone in the U.S. cared that it was killing thousands," a friend wrote in response to aquestion I posed on Facebook. "But now that like four people have it in the U.S., it is all-out panic."Whatever the reason, a lack of empathy is clearly at play.Too many people panic when Ebola hits Dallas but shrug at thegruesome reality in Monrovia. Too many worry that someone whomight have been in contact with an Ebola patienthas boarded a cruise ship bound for Belize -- but we don't feel forEbola's child orphans.I hope shining light on these realities can help change them.I'll leave you with a passage from anessay by Leslie Jamison, a woman who worked as a "medical actor," meaning she faked illnesses for emotionally tone-deaf medical students. As she listened to the sometimes hard-headed students interrogate her about her made-up illnesses, she learned a thing or two about what it means to actually empathize with a person."Empathy isn't just something that happens to us -- a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain -- it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves," she wrote.Take that as a challenge.Pay attention. Extend yourself.And demand world leaders do the same.