Health - NY

THE WASHINGTON POST                    0ct, 27, 2014
By Joel Achenbach, Brady Dennis and Lena H. Sun

The Ebola quarantine controversy has become a chaotic brawl involving politics, science and the law. The rules on quarantining health-care workers returning from West Africa are changing almost daily and varying according to geography and political climate.

The Pentagon announced Monday that Army personnel returning to their home base in Italy from Liberia will be held in quarantine for 21 days — even though none have symptoms of Ebola or were exposed to patients infected with the virus.

The military’s policy does not appear to track new guidelines announced Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called for “high-risk” individuals and health-care workers without any symptoms to be directly monitored by state and local health authorities.

ABC NEWS                                          Oct. 27, 2014

by Josh Margolin

NEWARK --New Jersey has decided to release a nurse who was fighting an order that forcibly quarantined her after she returned from Africa where she treated Ebola patients.

The release was announced this morning after Kaci Hickox, hired a lawyer to sue over her mandatory 21-day quarantine. Shortly before the decision by the New Jersey Health Department, the nurse said she hopes "this nightmare of mine and the fight that I’ve undertaken is not in vain.”

FOX NEWS                                Oct. 26, 2014

Doctors treating New York City’s first Ebola patient have given the ailing doctor a transfusion of blood plasma from an aid worker who was infected with the deadly disease in West Africa and survived.

Dr. Craig Spencer received the donated plasma Friday from Nancy Writebol, a health care worker with the Christian organization SIM. Writebol was treated in August at Emory Hospital in Georgia.

Bellevue Hospital, where Spencer is being treated, said Saturday evening that the 33-year-old physician is “entering the next phase of his illness as anticipated with the appearance of gastrointestinal symptoms.”

The public hospital said in a statement that the patient is “awake and communicating.”

Read complete story

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/10/26/new-york-doctor-with-ebola-gets-blood-transfusion-from-aid-worker-who-survived/

Health workers at Bellevue Hospital in New York on Oct. 8 demonstrated the gear that staff would wear to treat patients with Ebola. Credit Adrees Latif/Reuters

NEW YORK TIMES                                                                        Oct. 25, 2014

Detailed description of the differences in the way the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital and New York's Bellevue hospital handled their Ebola patients:.

"When Craig Spencer, a young doctor just back from treating patients with Ebola in Guinea, fell ill with the virus in New York on Thursday, the paramedics who went to get him were dressed in protective suits. He entered Bellevue Hospital through a rear door, far from the busy emergency room, and was taken to a state-of-the-art isolation ward that was locked and guarded.