A nurse under mandatory quarantine in New Jersey after caring for Ebola patients in Sierra Leone has blasted more stringent state policies for dealing with health care workers returning from West Africa, saying the change could lead to medical professionals being treated like “criminals and prisoners.”
Kaci Hickox wrote that she was ordered placed in quarantine at a hospital, where she has now tested negative in two tests for Ebola. Still, hospital officials told her she must remain under quarantine for 21 days.
“This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me,” she wrote.
The two-state policy was implemented the same day that nurse Kaci Hickox landed at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey after working with Doctors Without Borders in treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone.
A mandatory quarantine imposed by New York, New Jersey and Illinois on health care workers who just returned to the United States from treating Ebola patients in West Africa has prompted a debate on how to prevent the spread of the disease without discouraging medical aid workers from fighting it.
The isolation policy was abruptly implemented Friday by the governors of New York and New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie. The announcement came one day after a New York doctor who treated patients in Guinea became the first Ebola case diagnosed in New York City.
Should health care workers be quarantined?
The change to mandatory isolation for 21 days, which is thought to be Ebola’s incubation period, was implemented the same day that Hickox landed at Newark Liberty International Airport after working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone.
She said that she was held at the airport and questioned by various health workers after her flight landed at about 1 p.m. ET.
At first, her temperature — taken with a forehead scanner — was 98 degrees.
Hours later, with her cheeks flushed with anger over being held without explanation, another scanner check recorded her temperature as 101 degrees, she wrote.
“The female officer looked smug. ‘You have a fever now,'” she wrote. “I explained that an oral thermometer would be more accurate and that the forehead scanner was recording an elevated temperature because I was flushed and upset.”
She eventually got a police escort to a hospital, where her temperature was measured again at 98.6 degrees — normal. And she tested negative for Ebola, she wrote in the Dallas newspaper.
How the Ebola virus spreads
“I had spent a month watching children die, alone,” she wrote. “I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing… I sat alone in the isolation tent (in New Jersey) and thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?”
Hickox fears it will discourage some colleagues from taking up the necessary fight.
Credit: CNN