USA Today – by Gene SloneA health care worker who may have handled a specimen from the Liberian man who died from Ebola in Dallas is on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
Industry giant Carnival says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified it late Wednesday that a passenger on the Texas-based Carnival Magic was a lab supervisor at the Dallas hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan died from the disease earlier this month.
Carnival says the unnamed woman has been placed in isolation on the ship and has shown no signs of illness.
“At no point in time has the individual exhibited any symptoms or signs of infection, and it has been 19 days since she was in the lab with the testing samples,” Carnival says in a statement sent to USA TODAY. “She is deemed by CDC to be very low risk.”
The Carnival Magic is one of the largest cruise ships in the Caribbean with a capacity for more than 4,000 passengers. It sails with more than 1,000 crew members.
Carnival says it is in close contact with the CDC, and “at this time it has been determined that the appropriate course of action is to simply keep the guest in isolation on board.”
The Carnival Magic is on a seven-night cruise to the Western Caribbean that began Oct. 12 in Galveston, Texas. The ship called at the island of Roatan, Honduras on Wednesday and Belize City, Belize on Thursday. It’s scheduled to visit Cozumel, Mexico today and return to Galveston on Sunday morning.
Belize’s 7 News reports the Belize government refused a U.S. request Thursday to let the Dallas health care worker disembark in Belize so she could be flown home by air ambulance from a local airport.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2014/10/17/cruise-ship-ebola/17401823/
Holy crap! I know a guy in Texas that knows a guy who lives in Dallas and I talked to the guy I know and he talked to the guy he knows on the phone. I think I might have Ebola now!
LOL
Guy next to me on bus farted. Do you think I have ebola?