First Ebola case diagnosed in US confirmed by CDC

September 30, 2014

Ebola virus virion (credit: CDC)

In the first case of Ebola to be diagnosed in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed today through laboratory tests that a person who had traveled to Dallas from Liberia  was hospitalized Sept. 28 for testing for Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas.

Local public health officials have begun identifying close contacts of the person for further daily monitoring for 21 days after exposure, CDC said, adding that the ill person did not exhibit symptoms of Ebola during the flights from West Africa and CDC does not recommend that people on the same commercial airline flights undergo monitoring.

The World  Health Organization predicts numbers will continue to climb exponentially. More than 20 000 people will have been infected by early November, according to an open-access article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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