Family of infected US Ebola patient ordered to stay home, apartment cleaned

The residence of the US Ebola-infected patient is now being cleaned up and other contaminated items isolated by a licensed cleaning agency, while the family has been ordered to stay at home and a guard posted at their residence to ensure compliance.

According to the Dallas County Judge, Clay Jenkins, a licensed cleaning crew with adequate experience cleaning and sanitizing disease-infected residences has been called in to isolate the soiled bedding and other contaminated items of the US Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan. These items were placed inside special plastic bags and would be properly disposed of.

“We’ve used them in HIV/AIDs situations where we needed to do a cleanup and other blood-borne illness cleanup. They use appropriate disinfectants, and are appropriately licensed to do that,” County Judge Clay Jenkins said.

Meanwhile, health authorities in Dallas County have been monitoring the temperature and other fever symptoms of Mr. Duncan’s family twice a day since they were ordered to stay at home and not go anywhere outside the apartment. Health officials in Dallas County had requested the family not to go anywhere outside of their apartment, but following claims that one of the kids went to school despite the order, Dr. Christopher Perkins and Zachary Thompson, the Dallas County Health and Human Services Director, have personally hand-delivered a strict public order restraining the family from every going out in order to contain possible spread of the disease. A guard has been placed outside the residence of the quarantined family while state health experts would monitor them till October 19 or thereabout for possible signs of Ebola.

And in a related development, facts have emerged that Mr. Duncan actually told nurses at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas that he’d been to Africa, and that the nurses had entered the information in the nursing portion of the patient’s electronic health records, but this portion is not accessible to doctors who had their own separate workflow – hence Thomas Duncan was allowed to go home despite informing the hospital that he just returned from Liberia.

Wendell Watson, the hospital’s spokesman, explains that “we have made this change to increase the visibility and documentation of the travel question in order to alert all providers. We feel that this change will improve the early identification of patients who may be at risk for communicable diseases, including Ebola.” He was referring to his hospitals rectification of the nurses and doctors’ workflow records of patients electronic records, and that the travel history documentation of patient’s data has been relocated to a portion whereby both nurses and doctors can access them.