Frontier Airlines hunt passengers who flew with nurse

[Delta4Embassy]

"The airline also is reaching out to about 750 passengers on five flights Tuesday that used the same plane on which Vinson flew, Frontier said in a statement Thursday night. The trips were flight 2042, Dallas to Cleveland; flight 1104, Cleveland to Fort Lauderdale; flight 1105, Fort Lauderdale to Cleveland; flight 1101, Cleveland to Atlantaa; and flight 1100, Atlanta to Cleveland, The Denver Post reported.

A CDC spokesperson reached by FoxNews.com on Thursday declined to comment on the progress of the passenger notifications for flight 1143.

Frontier Airlines said in a staff memo that four flight attendants and two pilots from flight 1143 were on paid leave for 21 days, and The Cleveland Clinic and The MetroHealth System said Wednesday that some of their nurses and other employees on the same flight were also on paid leave."
Ebola outbreak CDC Frontier Airlines hunt passengers who flew with nurse Fox News

The spread of this virus will happen very quickly. The US healthcare system cannot handle this. Obama has failed us once again.

"I'm Sparatcus!"

 

[ChrisL]

wait...so everyone who flew on that plane has to be interviewed?
Why is that?
Were they all touching her "bodily fluids"?


...or are they just not sure whether the disease can be airborne?

This is just another reason to stop people from traveling to the United States from the Ebola hot spots.

Is Ebola Airborne Aerial Transmission Of The Virus Cannot Be Excluded

As health officials take greater steps to keep someone with Ebola from traveling, and as hospitals grapple with disposing of the soiled garments and bedsheets of their Ebola patients, another concern has emerged: What if the virus goes airborne? That fear has been tossed around ever since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in March, and health officials have insisted that the virus cannot be transmitted without direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. However, scientists demonstrated 25 years ago in lab testing that the virus could pass from one monkey to another through the air, leading some experts to say the possibility of the virus becoming airborne is real.

"We just don't have the data to exclude it," C.J. Peters, who researched Ebola in the late 1980s in Virginia, told the Los Angeles Times. As the virus passes from one host to another, it has more opportunity to evolve and take new shape. The fear is that the virus could mutate to become airborne and would be harder to discover.

The current Ebola outbreak has spread quickly, with almost 9,000 confirmed and suspected cases across West Africa and almost 4,500 deaths. Experts say there could be as many as 10,000 new cases per week in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of this year, the World Health Organization has warned.

There is no evidence that any of those cases or any of the handful of cases abroad were transmitted through the air. However, aerosol transmission, in which droplets of bodily fluids from an infected person become airborne, is still a threat, Ebola experts say. “Any procedure where you’re invasive, where you’re ventilating, creating an aerosol, or where there’s blood or secretion contamination, you create a risk,” Nancy Jaax, who was part of the research team that showed the virus could pass between monkeys through the air, told the Washington Times.

Additionally, a U.S. Army manual on infectious diseases distributed to military and health care providers around the world warns of an airborne version of the Ebola virus. “In several instances, secondary infections among contacts and medical personnel without direct body fluid exposure have been documented,” the manual says of viral hemorrhagic fever, a category that includes Ebola. “These instances have prompted concern of a rare phenomenon of aerosol transmission of infection.”

 

[ChrisL]

Viruses have a nasty habit of mutating, which makes viruses such as this difficult to predict. I am just stunned that people want to minimize this serious illness that has the potential to become an epidemic here in the US. There is no cure and there is no vaccine. It spreads quickly and is very deadly.