http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/220811-feds-on-defense-over-ebola
By Elise Viebeck - 10/15/14 10:43 AM EDT
Federal officials were notably absent from a press conference Wednesday in Dallas where the city’s mayor announced a second healthcare worker has contracted Ebola.
The second case is prompting new scrutiny of how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has handled the spread of the deadly disease to the United States.
The CDC has sent a team to Dallas to monitor the care of the two Ebola-infected medical workers, even as its leader has acknowledged it should have taken the step sooner.
“I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the patient, the first patient, was diagnosed,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said at a Tuesday press conference, referring to the federal infection control team.
“That might have prevented this infection. But we will do that from today onward with any case, anywhere in the U.S.”
Both healthcare workers in Dallas provided care to Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to carry Ebola undetected into the United States, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. He died last week.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on Wednesday said the federal government could have provided better oversight at the hospital, which has come under scathing criticism from a national union representing nurses.
Burwell didn't offer a direct response to questions about whether she had confidence in the Dallas hospital during an interview on "The Today Show."
The nurses union said nurses were not trained in Ebola care, were given incomplete protective gear, and continued to care for other patients at the same time, potentially putting them at risk.
“There was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol,” the statement from National Nurses United read. “There was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department” with questions but did not receive answers, the group said.
While the CDC did send a team initially to help with contact tracing and monitoring, Frieden said on Tuesday that it should have included more infection control specialists.
“I think in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, we could have sent a more robust infection control team and been more hands-on with the hospital about how this could be managed,” he said.
The CDC has at times struggled to coordinate its response and messaging in Dallas with the city's hospitals and state officials over the last month. The federal agency deferred to the hospital on criticisms of Duncan's care, though officials have acknowledged that mistakes were made when medical staff failed to communicate his travel history.
Appearing Wednesday morning on CBS, Burwell defended the administration's latest steps to improve oversight at the Dallas hospital, even as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings at the local press conference warned things would get worse before they would get better.
“Everyone knows that right now we are in the middle of an investigation to understand where there was a breach so we can better understand how the first healthcare worker, and now the second healthcare worker, have contracted Ebola,” Burwell said on “This Morning.”
“We'll continue to work on that and we did yesterday, whenever there is something that we see that we can improve upon, we will do that.”
Seventy-five other healthcare workers are being monitored for the virus in Dallas, and federal officials have warned more are likely to contract the disease.
The CDC is planning its own press conference later on Wednesday, and a spokesman did not respond to questions about the agency's absence from the local press conference.
The spread of Ebola is unprecedented in the United States, which had never seen a case prior to this year.
