A second Ebola-stricken healthcare worker who boarded an Oct. 13 flight from Cleveland to Dallas “should not have traveled on a commercial airliner,” Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Frieden said Wednesday.
He announced that other exposed healthcare workers will now be banned from taking public transportation until they clear the virus’ incubation period.
The woman, who has not been identified, had a slight fever of 99.5 degrees when she boarded Frontier Airlines Flight 1143 from Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth, but it did not register at the 100.4 degree “fever threshold” that would have flagged her for an Ebola test, Frieden said.
According to the National Institutes of Health, an adult has a fever when body temperature rises above 99 to 99.5 degrees.
The CDC is now trying to find and interview the 132 passengers on the plane. Frieden said he believes the risk of other passengers catching the virus remains “extremely low” because the healthcare worker was not vomiting or bleeding on the airplane.
Frieden said the patient, despite registering the higher temperature before boarding the plane, did not have a fever, in his estimation.
Frieden held the telephone press conference alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who remained mostly silent during the briefing.
Burwell repeated information from a press release sent earlier about efforts to contact the Frontier passengers and stressed that the effort to control Ebola here in the United States would involve coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security and trying to control Ebola in West Africa.
