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1. Texas Ebola Breach Raises Questions on Hospitals'
Readiness to Treat Virus
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The protocol breach at a Texas hospital being blamed for a health care worker being infected with
Ebola, the first person to contract the disease in the United States, raised concerns about whether
hospitals are prepared to treat the virus.
The health care worker was among the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital staff who treated Thomas
Eric Duncan, the first person disagnosed with Ebola in the United States. The hospital is not one of
the four in the U.S. with units specialized to handle diseases like Ebola.
"The comments from CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] early on that this could
be done in any hospital that is used to doing isolation just doesn't ring true to me," ABC News chief
health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser said.
"Groups like Doctors Without Borders, they have incredible training in this, and they practice it, and
it's the practicing that ensures that you don't have a slip-up," he said. "For our first patient in
America to lead already to a health care worker getting sick really raises a concern to me."
According to National Nurses United, the largest registered nurse union, surveys of their
membership indicate that most nurses feel hospital administrations have not communicated
adequately with staff about Ebola response plans.
"Reports of the infection of a nurse at the same hospital where the first U.S. patient, Thomas Eric
Duncan died in Dallas 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,"
NNU Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said Sunday.
So far, the only two cases of Ebola that have been diagnosed in the United States have been treated
at Texas Health Presbyterian.
The decision to not transfer Thomas Earl Duncan, who died of Ebola last week, to a specialized care
facility was criticized by members of his family.
The CDC has not said if the patient diagnosed with Ebola Sunday will be transferred to one of four
centers across the country where health care workers are trained to specialize in treating highly
infectious diseases.
"We are going to look at all opportunities to improve the level of safety and to minimize risk," CDC
Director Tom Frieden said at a press conference.
While he did not rule out transferring patients to specialized centers, Frieden said that all hospitals

2. should be prepared to safely treat Ebola.
"We do want hospitals to have the ability to rapidly consider, isolate, and diagnose people who may
have Ebola," he said.
Even before Sunday's announcement, hospitals from New York to Iowa to California have taken
steps to try to prepare for possible Ebola cases.
Some hospitals are sending memos to staff, and others are running all-out drills, many of them
following guidelines from the U.S. CDC, to make sure staff members know everything from how to
identify possible Ebola patients to how to get out of protective gear without contaminating
themselves.
All the U.S. citizens who contracted Ebola in Liberia and were brought to the United States were
transported to the Nebraska Biocontainment Patient Care Unit, in Omaha, and to the specialized
unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
Two more centers that are specialized to treat diseases like Ebola are at the National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda, Md., and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont.
The protocols put in place at Texas Health Presbyterian have been used for decades to treat Ebola,
according to Frieden, and can be used in other hospitals.
But Frieden conceded that the same
kind of protocol breach that led to the
infection announced Sunday could
have occurred to other hospital
workers at Texas Health Presbyterian.