US Ebola victim checked into ER but was sent home

Dallas - The airline passenger who brought Ebola into the US initially went to a Dallas emergency room last week but was sent home, despite telling a nurse that he had been in disease-ravaged West Africa, the hospital said on Wednesday in a disclosure that showed how easily an infection could be missed.

The decision by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to release the patient, identified as Thomas Eric Duncan, who had recently arrived from Liberia, could have put others at risk of exposure to Ebola before the man went back to the ER a couple of days later, when his condition worsened.

A day after the diagnosis was confirmed, a nine-member team of federal health officials was tracking anyone who had close contact with him after he fell ill on 24 September. The group of 12 to 18 people included three members of the ambulance crew that took the man to the hospital and a handful of schoolchildren.

They will be checked every day for 21 days, the disease's incubation period.

"That's how we're going to break the chain of transmission, and that's where our focus has to be," Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The CDC reminded the nation's health care providers to ask patients with symptoms if they've travelled recently. The American College of Emergency Physicians planned to alert its members as well.

Fever

The patient explained to a nurse last Thursday that he was visiting the US from Africa, but that information was not widely shared, said Dr Mark Lester, who works for the hospital's parent company.

"Regretfully, that information was not fully communicated" throughout the medical team, Lester said. Instead, the man was diagnosed with a low-risk infection and sent home.

He was prescribed antibiotics, according to his sister, Mai Wureh, who identified her brother, Thomas Eric Duncan, as the infected man in an interview with The Associated Press.

Duncan has been kept in isolation at the hospital since Sunday. He was listed in serious but stable condition.

Hospital epidemiologist Dr Edward Goodman said the patient had a fever and abdominal pain during his first ER visit, not the riskier symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea.

But the diagnosis, and the hospital's slip-up, highlighted the wider threat of Ebola, even in places far from West Africa.

"The scrutiny just needs to be higher now," said Dr Rade Vukmir, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians.