The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday there was a possible Ebola exposure at a lab in Atlanta.
The Washington Post is reporting that as many as a dozen scientists at a high-security CDC lab were possibly exposed to the virus. Scientists carrying out research on the virus may have mistakenly put a sample of it in an unsecure area.
A lab technician who processed the material might have been exposed, but the person has no symptoms of illness and is being monitored for 21 days, the Post reported.
Officials said there was no possible exposure outside of the CDC lab and there’s no risk to the public.
The mishap occurred on Monday afternoon.
The possible exposure is under internal investigation and has been reported to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, Reynolds said. Additional employees have been notified, but none has required monitoring.
CDC Director Tom Frieden said he’s troubled by the report.
“I have directed that there be a full review of every aspect of the incident and that CDC take all necessary measures,” he said in a statement.
In June, at least 52 workers at the CDC took antibiotics as a precaution because a lab safety problem was thought to have exposed them to anthrax.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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AP Report:
Ebola survival improving in Sierra Leone
One year into the world’s worst Ebola outbreak, doctors are reporting an encouraging sign: About 70 percent of patients in a hard-hit area of Sierra Leone now survive.
The Ebola death rate has fallen even though there are no specific medicines or vaccines to fight the virus. The outbreak began last December in the West African country of Guinea, but it wasn’t recognized until last spring. There have been nearly 20,000 cases and more than 7,500 deaths, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization estimates.
In a letter published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Kathryn Jacobsen of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and other doctors tell of 581 patients taken to an Ebolatreatment center that opened near Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, in late September.
They were given antibiotics, malaria medicines, ibuprofen for pain and fever, intravenous nutrients, anti-nausea medicine and other supportive care. About 31 percent died, including 38 people who were dead when they arrived. Among those admitted more recently, since Nov. 5, mortality was less than 24 percent.
That is much lower than the 74 percent death rate other doctors reported for 106 patients who were treated in the eastern Sierra Leone town of Kenema, in May and June, when some health workers were on strike and response to the outbreak was in crisis mode.
The new results are cause for “cautious optimism” that access to care may be improving survival, said one author of the earlier report, Tulane University’s Dr. Daniel Bausch. But they are not from a clinical trial or experiment, so the value of any specific treatment is not known, he said.
