Second Nurse With Ebola Called CDC Before Flight And Reported She Had a Fever. She Wasn’t Told Not to Fly.

On Monday, the
day before she contacted a hospital about her symptoms, Texas nurse
Amber Vinson, the second nurse to eventually be infected with Ebola
after treating the first patient with the virus, took a commercial
flight from Cleveland to Dallas. 

Before she boarded the plane, she called the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) and reported that she had a fever of 99.5
Fahrenheit.

Here’s what happened next,
according to NBC News
:

According to the government spokesperson, when Vinson called in,
the staff she talked with looked on the CDC website for guidance.
At the time, the category for “uncertain risk” had guidance saying
that a person could fly commercially if they did not meet the
threshold of a temperature of 100.4.

The final guidance? Vinson “was not told that she could not
fly,” the unnamed government spokesperson
told NBC News
 and
other news outlets
Wednesday evening. 

CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said the nurse “should not have
traveled on a commercial aircraft.”

But she did. And she apparently wasn’t told by the CDC that she
shouldn’t or couldn’t. 

Now, it’s not likely that anyone else on her flight contracted
Ebola. “Chances that other passengers were infected were very low
because Vinson did not vomit on the flight and was not bleeding,”

according
to Reuters. Even still, it should not have happened.
It was a preventable error. 

This is the latest in a string of worrisome incidents involving
the CDC going back through the summer. 

In June, the CDC announced that
dozens of workers
in its Atlanta facility had been
inadvertently exposed to anthrax. The samples had not been properly
“inactivated” before being moved. As a result, they were handled
without necessary protection.

An internal review of
the incident later found that “use of unapproved sterilization
technicques,” “transfer of material not confirmed to be inactive,”
and “lack of a standard operating procedure or process on
inactivation and transfer” played a role. 

In July, the CDC admitted
that it had unexpectedly found six long-lost vials in a
storage room at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
Several of those vials contained still-active samples of smallpox,
which is deadly. 

In the aftermath of those incidents, the CDC
temporarily closed two of its labs
and stopped many sample
transfers. The head of the lab where the anthrax exposure ocurred
resigned. 

In that incident, “the scientists failed to follow a
scientifically derived and reviewed protocol that would have
assured the anthrax was deactivated,” CDC Director Frieden said,
according
to CNN at the time. The short version: It “should have happened,
and it didn’t.”

Months later, with the pressure on the agency as the first Ebola
cases hit the United States, the CDC does not seem to have improved
all of its processes. Things that should be happening clearly
aren’t happening, and things that should not be happening
are. 

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