(Reuters) - Mandatory quarantines ordered by some U.S. states for doctors and nurses returning from West Africa's Ebola outbreak are creating a "chilling effect" on aid work there, the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders said on Thursday.
A Doctors Without Borders health worker takes off his protective gear under the surveillance of a colleague at a treatment facility for Ebola victims in Monrovia September 29, 2014. Credit: Reuters/James Giahyue
New York officials announced on Thursday that they would offer employee protection and financial guarantees for health care workers joining the fight against the Ebola outbreak in three West African nations.
The announcement was an effort to alleviate concerns that the state’s mandatory quarantine policy could deter desperately needed workers from traveling overseas.
Under the new protections, modeled after the rights granted military reservists, workers could not suffer any pay cuts or demotions for serving in Africa, and the state would make up any lost income if they had to be quarantined when they returned.
NBC NEWS Oct. 30, 2014 By Maggie Fox and Stacey Naggiar
Close to 50 volunteers have come back safe and well from the Ebola hot zone in West Africa, aid agencies tell NBC News, even as states debate whether to force such workers into quarantine.
Denmark / U.S. CBP via Reuters file
A look at the numbers from groups such as Doctors Without Borders and the International Medical Corps shows just about 150 people have gone to help fight the epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Of them, 47 have returned symptom-free.
HOMELAND SECURITY NEWSWIRE Oct. 30, 1014 Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) issued new guidelines on how states should deal with travelers from Ebola-stricken regions, but a lack of federal authority to mandate such guidelines has led to conflicting strategies, varying from state to state, which includes mandatory at-home quarantine for some travelers. Under current U.S. law, the states have the authority to issue quarantine or isolation policies, and they also control the enforcement of these policies within their territories.
THREE ARTICLES DESCRIBING DETAILS OF THE EBOLA VIRUS AND OTHER VIRUSES. (Scroll Down)
Advances in microscopy have allowed scientists like Sriram Subramaniam and colleagues at the National Cancer Institute to look at the workings of tiny viruses. In this case, microscopy was used to illustrate the complex process in which human cells infected with HIV-1, green and blue, are linked to uninfected cells.Credit Illustration by Donald Bliss/N.I.H, from The Journal of Virology/American Society for Microbiology
The research on how the virus spreads is not as ambiguous as some have made it seem
A young man, dressed in a biohazard costume, stands on the corner of 546 West 147th Street in New York City.Bryan Thomas/Getty Images
VOX Oct. 29, 2014 By Julia Bellez As Ebola fears wash over America, some state governors are turning to mandatory quarantines: locking up healthy workers returning from West Africa for 21 days, Ebola's incubation period. The policy in New Jersey made national headlines after it resulted in a nurse who had no Ebola symptoms — and had been fighting the disease in West Africa, no less — being isolated in a poorly heated tent with no running shower or toilet.
Report says that when a 5-year-old boy who came back from Guinea was admitted to New York's Bellevue hospital recently, city officials stopped the use of a a one-hour testing device although it had received the FDA's emergency approval.
As a result, it took 10 hours from the time he spiked a fever till his parents, medical staff, and the public found out, he did NOT have Ebola.
The release today of nurse Amber Vinson from the Emory Unversity hospital in Atlanta hospital leaves a single person in the United States now battling Ebola, though MS Vinson and others -- including President Barack Obama -- stressed the fight against the deadly virus isn't over.
Dr. Craig Spencer is now the only person in the United States being treated for Ebola. The 33-year-old was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York City after developing a fever on Thursday, six days after returning to the United States and over a week after leaving Guinea, where he worked for Doctors Without Borders.
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday said that new Ebola guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “sensible, based in science” and would help keep Americans safe while not discouraging volunteers from traveling to West Africa to battle the disease at its source....
The federal government on Monday tried to take charge of an increasingly acrimonious national debate over how to treat people in contact with Ebola patients by announcing guidelines that stopped short of tough measures in New York and New Jersey and were carefully devised, officials said, not to harm the effort to recruit badly needed medical workers to West Africa.
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