5-year-old Boy Tested for Ebola in NYC after return from Africa
By Larry Celona and Kenneth Garger
A 5-year-old boy who just returned from West Africa was transported to Bellevue Hospital Sunday with possible Ebola symptoms, according to law-enforcement sources.
The child was vomiting and had a 103-degree fever when he was carried from his Bronx home by EMS workers wearing hazmat suits, neighbors said. “He looked weak,” said a neighbor.
“He was really, really out of it.”
The boy returned with his family from Guinea Saturday night and five members of the family were being quarantined inside their apartment, sources said.
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Video: Bias Against Ebola Health Workers ‘Unacceptable’: NYC Mayor
New York Mayor Bill De Blasio says there will be consequences for people disrespecting Ebola health care workers
Bellevue Hospital staff have been ‘refused service at restaurants’ by New Yorkers afraid of contracting Ebola, Mayor Bill De Blasio reveals
New Yorkers are not particularly known for their hospitality, but Mayor Bill De Blasio thinks some have crossed a line in their treatment of the brave Bellevue Hospital staffers who have been caring for the city’s first Ebola patient.
The mayor held an afternoon press conference on Sunday to discuss the mistreatment of Bellevue health care workers who he says have been denied service at restaurants, and had their children treated differently, just because they work at the same hospital where Dr Craig Spencer is currently being treated for the deadly disease in an isolation ward.
Dr Spencer, 33, was admitted to the hospital on Thursday – just six days after returning from Guinea where he was working with Doctors without Borders to aid in the largest outbreak of the virus in history.
Mayor De Blasio and his wife Chiraline McCray visited the isolation ward at Bellevue where Dr Spencer is being treated and said the volunteering health care workers they encountered there were ‘calm, cool, collected and purposeful’.
However, he was shocked to hear reports about how some of these doctors and nurses were being denied food and treated differently when strangers learned they worked at the hospital.
Mayor De Blasio called these instances ‘absolutely unacceptable’, adding that ‘there will be consequences for those individuals’ found disrespecting nurses or other medical personnel.
He did not specify what kind of punishment could be handed out.
Mr De Blasio went on to describe the Bellevue workers treating Dr Craig Spencer as the ‘the first responders in this crisis’ and like ‘the Marines of our health care system’.
The mayor also addressed a nurse who was being monitored this weekend in New Jersey, under new rules in both New Jersey and New York requiring health care workers returning from West Africa to submit to a 21-day quarantine.
Nurse Kaci Hickox talked to CNN about her ‘inhumane’ containment at the airport, saying she is confined in a tent with limited contact to the outside world, no flushable toilet, TV or reading material.
Mayor de Blasio appeared to hit out at New Jersey officials, by calling the conditions of Ms Hickox’s quarantine ‘inappropriate’.
‘The problem here is that this hero coming back from the front, having done the right thing, was treated with disrespect and was treated as if she had done something wrong when she hadn’t,’ Mayor de Blasio said. ‘We owe her better than that.’
However, the mayor added that he respects the right of other governments to make their own decisions in how to handle this outbreak.