NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal health officials yesterday revamped guidelines for doctors and nurses returning home to the United States from treating Ebola patients in West Africa, stopping well short of controversial mandatory quarantines being imposed by some US states.
Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), called for voluntary home quarantine for people at the highest risk for Ebola infection but said most medical workers returning from the three countries at the centre of the epidemic would require daily monitoring without isolation.
New York and New Jersey are among a handful of states to impose mandatory quarantines on returning doctors and nurses amid fears of the virus spreading outside of West Africa, where it has killed nearly 5,000 people in the worst outbreak on record.
The Obama administration’s new guidelines are not mandatory and states will have the right to put in place policies that are stricter. Some state officials, grappling with an unfamiliar public health threat, had called federal restrictions placed on people travelling from Ebola-affected countries insufficient to protect Americans and have imposed tougher measures.
With thousands already dead from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, concerns are high in the United States about stopping its spread. In New York City yesterday, a 5-year-old boy who arrived in the United States from Guinea and was in hospital for screening for fever, tested negative for Ebola.
The CDC’s Frieden, on a conference call with reporters, warned against turning doctors and nurses who are striving to tackle Ebola in West Africa before it spreads more widely into “pariahs.”
Under new CDC guidelines that spell out four risk categories, most healthcare workers returning from West Africa’s Ebola hot zone would be considered to be at “some risk” for infection, while healthcare workers tending to Ebola patients at US facilities would be seen as “low but non-zero” risk.
In other Ebola-related developments, the US military said it was isolating troops returning from their mission to help West African countries curb Ebola even though they showed no sign of infection. And a nurse who treated patients in Sierra Leone was released to go to her home state of Maine after New Jersey had forced her into quarantine. The nurse had been kept in quarantine for two days after testing negative for the Ebola virus.
There has been a growing chorus of critics, including public health experts, the United Nations, medical charities and even the White House, denouncing mandatory quarantines as scientifically unjustified and an obstacle to fighting the disease at its source in West Africa.
“At CDC, we base our decisions on science and experience. We base our decisions on what we know and what we learn. And as the science and experience changes, we adopt and adapt our guidelines and recommendations,” Frieden said.