A new incident at Newark Airport (just outside NYC). Two people removed from flight, by responders in Hazmat suits:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...toms-Ebola.html

I applaud the first responders.

Hopefully, this is a false alarm.

But IMO, there is a point where the false alarms overwhelm the response system.

Isn't this the second incident coming from Brussels?

Not disagreeing with you, but a citation for this would be helpful.

Texas Presbyterian Hospital backtracks on its explanation about how Mr Duncan could have been sent home after his first ER visit.

At first, the hospital issued a statement saying basically that nurses and doctors see different information from their electronic health records system and that the physician was not able to see the notation about recent travel from Liberia.

However, the hospital then issued a new statement yesterday explaining that actually, the physician could see the travel history notation. No further comment from the hospital.

Just a follow up to this question I raised. The US Deptartment of Transportation has issued new regulatory guidelines on the transportation of Ebola-related materials. So Texas was issued a special permit and other states will follow, if necessary.

This is not the first epidemic the country has faced, though, and Ebola has been raging in Africa for months, so you would think this process would have already been ready to go as soon as the first confirmed case (Dr Kent Brantly, not Duncan) was flown back and hospitalized in the US.

On a side note: If you read the special packaging requirements for Ebola waste in the new regs and compare that to the scene of those guys simply power washing the sidewalk of Duncan's infected vomit, you can see a big disconnect there. Poor guys. They're probably low paid employees of a private contractor and may not even have health insurance of their own!

Depends how thinly spread out the material is. If there were clumps or mounds of material, who knows how long the center part could remain infectious?

And what happened during the interim time before the sidewalk was finally cleaned? Was someone guarding it until then? Did someone's dog lick the vomit and then go home and lick their owner on the face shortly thereafter? Did a child innocently ride their bike through it and then somehow touched their tire later with an unprotected hand? These are hypotheticals, of course, but not unreasonable scenarios, I think.

Which just means that someone in charge should have thought about the infection risk pretty early on. It's no secret that he vomited outside when moving to the ambulance because it was widely reported.

Ask & receive:

Ebola Airborne Transmission

Airborne transmission (general)

Sneeze particle size

Excellent, thank you!

Here is some more info on the likelihood of Ebola spreading: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/...tm_term=nprnews Things could be a lot worse

According to this article, a nurse in Spain is the first to contract Ebola outside of Africa. This nurse in Madrid was diagnosed with Ebola after tending to a priest with Ebola who got it while in Sierra Leone.

If this nursing survey that has been posted a couple times already reflects reality--that many nurses feel that they and their institutions are ill prepared for Ebola--this Spanish incident could lead to a lot of soul searching, especially now that more and more community based hospitals in the US are dealing with cases or suspected cases in recent days rather than "elite" teams from the CDC and special high-risk biocontainment wards.

This is very disturbing news. This nurses PPE kit was obviously inadequate. This virus must be incredibly contagious, probably airborne despite the denial by the authorities that own the intellectual property rights to the virus.