Boston clinic in lockdown amid ebola scare

A medical clinic outside of Boston was quarantined and a patient has been isolated outside the hospital with a possible case of ebola, the Boston Globe reported last night.

Police, fire officials and emergency medical services arrived at the Harvard Vanguard Medical Center in Braintree, Massachusetts, Joe Zanca, with the Braintree Fire Department, told the Globe.

“Ebola protocol is in place,” Zanca said, noting that the patient in isolation recently travelled to West Africa. Representatives of the hospital and Braintree fire and police departments could not immediately be reached for further comment.

The current ebola outbreak, the worst on record of the disease, has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in West Africa.

Meanwhile, a Texas health worker has contracted ebola after treating a Liberian who died of the disease at a Dallas hospital last week, raising concern about how US medical guidelines aimed at stopping the spread of the disease were breached.

The infected worker, identified as a woman but not named by authorities as they announced the case yesterday, is believed to be the first person to contract the disease in the US.

Health officials said the worker at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had been wearing protective gear during treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan. Duncan was a Liberian who died on Wednesday after being exposed to ebola in his home country and developing the disease while visiting the United States.

The outbreak in West Africa, the worst outbreak on record of ebola, has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The new case in Texas indicated a professional lapse that may have caused other health workers at the hospital to also be infected, said the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We don’t know what occurred in the care of the index patient, the original patient, in Dallas, but at some point there was a breach in protocol, and that breach in protocol resulted in this infection,” “We are evaluating other potential healthcare worker exposures because if this individual was exposed, which they were, it is possible that other individuals were exposed,” he said. The worker was in close contact with Duncan and initial testing shows that the level of virus in her system is low. The CDC will conduct a secondary test to confirm the results from a lab in Austin that showed ebola infection, he said.

“Unfortunately it is possible in the coming days that we will see additional cases of ebola,” he said. — Reuters