DALLAS — Amid widening concern about Ebola across the United States, federal health officials said on Saturday that they had assessed more than 100 possible cases of the disease in recent weeks. But they have confirmed only one, in a Liberian man in Dallas, the first Ebola case diagnosed in this country.
The Dallas hospital where the Liberian man, Thomas E. Duncan, has been recovering changed the status of his condition on Saturday from serious to critical.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that the Dallas case, as well as the spreading outbreak in West Africa, had increased attention about the virus among both the public and health workers.
“We have already gotten well over 100 inquiries of possible patients,” Dr. Frieden said. “We’ve assessed every one of those with local health departments and hospitals. And just this one patient has tested positive. We expect that we will see more rumors, or concerns, or possibilities of cases. Until there is a positive laboratory test, that is what they are – rumors and concerns.”
Retracing the Steps of Dallas Ebola Patient
In those 100 inquiries, about 15 people were tested for Ebola, officials at the disease centers. In addition to doing their own testing on suspected cases, federal officials have helped more than a dozen laboratories around the United States do their own Ebola testing.
One of those cases took place at Howard University Hospital in Washington, which issued a statement on Saturday saying that, after working with the District of Columbia Health Department and the federal, disease centers, it had “ruled out” Ebola in a patient who was admitted on Thursday. The patient, who had traveled to Nigeria, had been placed in isolation “in an abundance of caution,” a statement by the university’s president, Dr. Wayne A. I. Frederick, said.
The Obama administration said Saturday that it had issued an emergency permit allowing an Illinois company to transport large quantities of potentially Ebola-contaminated material from the apartment where Mr. Duncan had stayed, as well as from the hospital where he is being treated, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. The permit ends days of delays in disposing of the waste.
Federal officials said on Saturday that they had narrowed the pool of people who were at a risk of exposure because they had contact with Mr. Duncan while he was infectious to nine, all of whom are being closely monitored.
Initially, officials had reached out to 114 people in the Dallas area who potentially had direct or indirect contact with Mr. Duncan since he arrived in the city on Sept. 20. They have reduced that number to about 50 people – the nine at high risk because they had definite contact with Mr. Duncan and about 40 others considered at lower risk.
“We don’t know that they had contact, but because we’re not certain that they did not have contact, we will be monitoring them as well,” said Dr. Frieden. Some of those people included patients who traveled in the ambulance that had carried Mr. Duncan to the hospital before it was taken out of service and cleaned.
The nine people who were at the highest risk include Mr. Duncan’s girlfriend and three of her relatives, who stayed with him in their Dallas apartment, as well as medical workers.
On Friday, local officials moved the four people with whom Mr. Duncan had been staying. Amid criticism that health officials had delayed cleaning the apartment and that they had failed to properly care for the four people quarantined inside, workers in yellow protective suits began cleaning the unit in the Ivy Apartments on Friday.
The delay in cleaning the apartment was due in part to confusion and conflicting guidance over state and federal permitting. “This has been a paperwork nightmare,” said Michael S. Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas.
That bottleneck was just one of several problems connected with the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the country.
Texas Health Presbyterian sent Mr. Duncan home when he first came to its emergency room on Sept. 25 after health workers failed to consider the possibility that he had Ebola. On Friday, the hospital acknowledged that both the nurses and the doctors in that initial visit had access to the fact that he had arrived from Liberia but, for reasons that remain unclear, failed to act on that information.
After his release, Mr. Duncan exposed an unknown number of people to the virus, including several schoolchildren.
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