Several Americans may have had contact overseas with the Ebola patient being treated in Maryland, and one of them is being flown to the Atlanta area for monitoring, officials said Friday.
On Friday morning, a volunteer healthcare worker who is seriously ill with the disease arrived at the National Institutes of Health high-security facility in Bethesda, Md., after being flown from Sierra Leone overnight.
That individual, who is the 11th Ebola patient to be treated on U.S. soil, may have come into contact with several other Americans still in Sierra Leone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday afternoon.
None of the others have tested positive for Ebola. But one of them is being flown to the Atlanta area to be close to Emory University Hospital. The rest are still in Sierra Leone, but the agency is developing contingency plans to fly them back to the U.S. where they will be isolated and monitored for 21 days.
Officials have not identified the patient being treated at NIH, but said midday that the worker is seriously ill.
“NIH physicians have evaluated the patient with Ebola virus disease and have determined that the patient’s condition is serious,” NIH said.
