From [HERE] A white nurse who was being quarantined at a New Jersey hospital after working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone criticized her treatment on Saturday as an overreaction after an initial test found that she did not have the virus.
“I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa,” the nurse, Kaci Hickox, wrote in an essay on the website of The Dallas Morning News, in collaboration with a friend who works for the paper. “I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear, and most frightening, quarantine.”
She described being held in isolation for about seven hours at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, left alone for long stretches and given only a granola bar when she said she was hungry.
Ms. Hickox, 33, was placed in quarantine under a new policy announced Friday by the governors of New York and New Jersey. All people entering the United States through Newark Liberty and Kennedy Airports will now be quarantined for 21 days if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia or Sierra Leone, even if they show no symptoms of infection.
On Friday night, New Jersey health officials said the nurse had developed a fever after landing, but on Saturday, they said her blood had tested negative for Ebola. Additional tests will be conducted to confirm the finding.
Ms. Hickox disputed that she had had a fever. She wrote that at the airport, a forehead scanner showed her temperature to be 101, but that came after four hours during which she had not been allowed to leave.
“My cheeks were flushed, I was upset at being held with no explanation,” she wrote. “The female officer looked smug. ‘You have a fever now,’ she said.”
She was eventually escorted by eight police cars to the hospital and taken to a tent outside the building. An oral thermometer showed her temperature to be 98, she wrote. A forehead scan taken around the same time read 101, she wrote, suggesting that it was not a reliable instrument to determine fever.
She wrote that the doctor felt her neck and rechecked the temperature. “ ‘There’s no way you have a fever,’ he said. ‘Your face is just flushed.’ ”
Her complaints served as a broadside against the new quarantine policy, which goes further than recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new policy has raised concerns among some health experts and doctors that it will discourage people from going to West Africa to try to contain Ebola at its source. The World Health Organization reported on Saturday that there were more than 10,000 suspected or confirmed cases in the three hardest-hit countries.
The C.D.C. calls for self-monitoring for travelers who have had contact with Ebola patients, but not isolation, because a patient is not believed to be contagious until symptoms appear. But C.D.C. officials said that states had the right to go beyond its recommendations.
On Saturday, in a sign of growing concern about the virus, Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, the home of another major travel hub, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, began a quarantine program similar to the one in place in New York and New Jersey. Connecticut, which enacted a similar policy on Oct. 7, has quarantined nine people who have so far showed no symptoms.
New Jersey officials did not immediately respond on Saturday to the nurse’s complaints about her treatment and about the policy. The C.D.C., which is involved in the monitoring of travelers at the airport, did not immediately answer questions about how she had been handled.
On Friday, the day after a New York City doctor who had worked in Guinea through Doctors Without Borders tested positive for Ebola, the governors of New York and New Jersey described the quarantines as a necessary caution.
After a rally for his re-election campaign in Port Chester, N.Y., on Saturday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said aid groups had told him that their volunteers would want to be quarantined if they believed they might have been infected with Ebola. (Doctors Without Borders said on Saturday that “there is a notable lack of clarity about the new guidelines,” and that it was concerned about the treatment of Ms. Hickox, who worked with the organization.)
“They are responsible when it comes to health care,” Mr. Cuomo said of the aid groups. “You’re not going to have a health care professional come back and say, ‘I may have been infected, let me go run around and possibly expose people until we know.’ ”
Later, on his campaign bus, Mr. Cuomo said many details of the quarantine were still being figured out. “We’re learning,” he said. “None of us have been here. It’s an iterative process.” He added: “There is no written ‘Ebola Policy 2014.’ So you learn, you adjust.”