DALLAS Texas (Reuters) - A Texas health worker at the hospital treating the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States has likely become the first person to contact the deadly virus in the country, raising fresh worries about the spread of the disease.
The worker at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had been wearing protective gear during treatment of the patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week after being exposed to Ebola in Liberia, health officials said on Sunday.
The infection indicated a breach in protocol which may have caused other health workers at the hospital to also be infected, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.
"We are evaluating other potential healthcare worker exposures because if this individual was exposed, which they were, is possible that other individuals were exposed," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, told a news conference.
"The level of her symptoms and indications from the test itself suggest that level of virus that she has was low," Frieden said of the infected worker.
Frieden said there was one person who may have had contact with the infected health worker when she could possible transmit the disease and that person is being monitored.
Frieden said the intubation of Duncan and use of a dialysis machine posed high risk for transmission of the virus.
The outbreak in West Africa has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The CDC is conducting a test to confirm initial results from a lab in Austin that showed Ebola infection. The CDC results were expected for later on Sunday.
Duncan died in an isolation ward on Oct. 8, 11 days after being admitted, with more than 50 people attending to his care. The hospital said it was decontaminating its isolation unit while health officials said Duncan's body had been cremated.
(Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio, Frank McGurty in New York, David Bailey in Minneapolis and David Morgan in Washington; Writing by Jon Herskovitz, Jason Neely and Brendan O'Brien; Editing by Anna Willard and Stephen Powell)
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