BREAKING NEWS! Active Ebola transmission in Texas! -CNN

The Texas Hospital where Duncan was treated and where the new case worked. Yahoo/Reuters

According to CNN, a health care worker who had helped Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for Ebola.  A news release by the Texas Department of State Health Services, confirms that worker tested positive in his or her initial screenings. Samples are being sent to the CDC in Atlanta for confirmation but a negative result is very unlikely. If and when the case is confirmed it would be the first transmission in the United States and the 2nd outside of Africa. The worker had cared for America's first "in the wild" case, Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week.

My Comment:
Reuters is reporting this story as well so it is legit. Details are very sketchy at this point and there is always a possibility that this is somehow a mistake, but it seems like this is the real deal. I've got a ton of questions of course. Who is this health care worker? Was it someone who worked with Duncan in isolation or was it someone who had contact with him before he was admitted? He was out and about for a week and had been sent home from the hospital with an 103 degree fever. Either scenario is disturbing, but the second one scares me more. It's easy for health care workers to make a mistake with this disease so it wouldn't be unheard of for a doctor or nurse to get the disease while treating an infected patient. If it happened before he was admitted though, it means that everyone that was in the hospital that day when he was turned away is at risk. This might only be the beginning.

Right now the infection rate is at N1 which is all the disease needs to sustain itself. That number may rise if Duncan's family or other health care workers get sick. The health officials really need to clamp down on suspected cases to make sure that it doesn't spread any more then it already has.

This of course brings up travel restrictions. If congress and the president had restricted travel to the West African countries this would have never happened. Even something as simple as a ban on non-essential travel could have stopped this. Both the United States and Spain are having trouble with just one imported case. What happens when there are two or ten or fifty? The reason the situation is so bad in Liberia and Sierra Leone is because isolation and contact tracing became impossible because there were just to many victims. We can stop the outbreak here and now, but only if we stop bringing new cases in from Africans here for a "visit". I'm not saying we should close the borders, but we should at the very least stop casual flight between West Africa and the rest of the world. I just don't think any of our governments will do what needs to be done here...