Did Patient Zero Come to the U.S. Because He Had Ebola? (Updated: Is This Him?)
Was he planning on being a VISA overstay? He quit his job.
Did Patient Zero Come to the U.S. Because He Had Ebola? (Updated: Is This Him?)
by
BRYAN PRESTON
October 1, 2014 - 1:36 pm
Sift through the facts presented in this New York Times story about Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who has a confirmed case of Ebola in Dallas.
He came into direct contact with a friend who had Ebola. He rode with her in a taxi and carried her from the taxi to a hospital on September 15, four days before he flew to the United States. She was turned away from the hospital because the Ebola ward was full.
She died of Ebola early the following morning. Her brother also got sick and shows Ebola symptoms. That was at the same time that Duncan started getting sick. He left Liberia and arrived in Texas on September 20. Six days later he sought treatment at Texas Presbyterian Hospital, and was sent home. He returned two days later, and has been confirmed to be infected with Ebola.
Duncan also abruptly quit his job on September 4, so he might have already planned the trip to see his family in the U.S.
But he certainly knew that he had been exposed to Ebola by the time he boarded that plane and came to Texas, four days after his friend died of it. He must surely have known it when he first visited the Texas Presbyterian Hospital, and he must have known it when the doctors sent him home.
And yet he went home, and exposed others, including children. Did he come to the U.S., knowing that he could get treatment here — but also aware that he was transporting the disease without alerting any authorities?
Update: This appears to be his Facebook page. This Thomas Eric Duncan is from Liberia, as is the Dallas Ebola patient, and he has a sister named Mai Wureh. The Facebook page links to a “friend” with the same unusual name.
This would be Thomas Eric Duncan, then.
http://cdn.pjmedia.com/tatler/files/2014/10/duncan.jpg
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/10/01/did-patient-zero-come-to-the-us-because-he-had-ebola/
Travel from Liberia to the US requires a visitors VISA
NONIMMIGRANT VISAS
The United States Embassy in Monrovia offers appointments for nonimmigrant (visiting) visas on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Nonimmigrant visas are appropriate for any individual seeking to temporarily visit the United States. This may include travel for business or tourism, medical treatment, education or research, religious work, official government business or other temporary reasons.
For more information about nonimmigrant visa applications, appointments and interviews, visit our How to Apply page. Use the links on the left to access more specific information about different categories of nonimmigrant visas, and explore our Frequently Asked Questions page for more visa guidance.
http://monrovia.usembassy.gov/nonimmigrant_visas.html
U.S. Patient Aided Pregnant Liberian, Then Took Ill
U.S. Patient Aided Pregnant Liberian, Then Took Ill
Liberian Officials Identify Ebola Victim in Texas as Thomas Eric Duncan
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
OCT. 1, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — A man who flew to Dallas and was later found to have the Ebola virus was identified by senior Liberian government officials on Wednesday as Thomas Eric Duncan, a resident of Monrovia in his mid-40s.
Mr. Duncan, the first person to develop symptoms outside Africa during the current epidemic, had direct contact with a woman stricken by Ebola on Sept. 15, just four days before he left Liberia for the United States, the woman’s parents and Mr. Duncan’s neighbors said.
In a pattern often seen here in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, the family of the woman, Marthalene Williams, 19, took her by taxi to a hospital with Mr. Duncan’s help on Sept. 15 after failing to get an ambulance, said her parents, Emmanuel and Amie Williams. She was convulsing and seven months pregnant, they said.
Turned away from a hospital for lack of space in its Ebola treatment ward, the family said it took Ms. Williams back home in the evening, and that she died hours later, around 3 a.m.
Mr. Duncan, who was a family friend and also a tenant in a house owned by the Williams family, rode in the taxi in the front passenger seat while Ms. Williams, her father and her brother, Sonny Boy, shared the back seat, her parents said. Mr. Duncan then helped carry Ms. Williams, who was no longer able to walk, back to the family home that evening, neighbors said.
He was holding her by the legs, the pa was holding her arms and Sonny Boy was holding her back,” said Arren Seyou, 31, who witnessed the scene and occupies the room next to Mr. Duncan’s.
Sonny Boy, 21, also started getting sick about a week ago, his family said, around the same time that Mr. Duncan first started showing symptoms.
In a sign of how furiously the disease can spread, an ambulance had come to their house on Wednesday to pick up Sonny Boy. Another ambulance picked up a woman and her daughter from the same area, and a team of body collectors came to retrieve the body of yet another woman — all four appeared to have been infected in a chain reaction started by Marthalene Williams.
A few minutes after the ambulance left, the parents got a call telling them that Sonny Boy had died on the way to the hospital.
Mr. Duncan had lived in the neighborhood, called 72nd SKD Boulevard, for the past two years, living by himself in a small room that he rented from the Williams couple. He had told that them and his neighbors that his son lived in the United States, played baseball, and was trying to get him to come to America.
For the past year, Mr. Duncan had worked as a driver at Safeway Cargo, the Liberian customs clearance agent for FedEx, said Henry Brunson, the company’s manager.
In an office with a large FedEx sign outside the building in downtown Monrovia, Mr. Brunson said that Mr. Duncan quit abruptly on Sept. 4, giving no reason. But Mr. Brunson said he knew that Mr. Duncan had family members in the United States as well.
“His sister came from the United States and he asked for a day off so that he could go meet her at the Mamba Point Hotel,” Mr. Brunson said, mentioning a hotel popular among foreigners. “He quit a few weeks after that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/world/africa/ebola-victim-texas-thomas-eric-duncan.html?_r=1
Immigration Expert: Obama Admin Responsible for Letting Ebola Patient into U.S.
by Matthew Boyle 1 Oct 2014, 1:03 PM PDT
breitbart
http://cdn.breitbart.com/mediaserver...ts-reuters.jpg
President Barack Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Secretary of State John Kerry are directly responsible for allowing Ebola into the United States, the Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News.
Vaughan points to federal law--the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)--which she notes gives the administration “broad authority” to bar non-citizens like Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient allowed into the U.S., from entering the country. The administration took no steps pursuant to that federal law, however, to block people like him from potentially endangering Americans.
“They have broad authority to bar any non-citizen from entering the country,” she said in a phone interview with Breitbart News. “But the INA does have a provision on the books already that bars people who have communicable diseases who of public health significance. It gives the authority to HHS to create that list. The language says it’s only people who have them who are barred."
"So what you have to do is set up a system of screening to make sure people you’re allowing to travel into the country are clear," she explained. "We’ve done that with some of these other diseases in the past-and the way they do that is every visa issuing post has local doctors that they work with who will screen people who get immigrant visas to make sure they don’t have tuberculosis or leprosy or other diseases. You could similarly require that people who want to travel here on visitor’s visas go through a medical screening and put the burden of proof on the traveler to show they are not infected and are not carrying the disease.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), in an appearance on Laura Ingraham's nationally syndicated radio show Wednesday morning, also warned that the administration was not acting forcefully enough. “I think that it is being dominated by political correctness, and I think because it’s being dominated by political correctness we’re not really making sound, rational, scientific decisions,” Paul said.
The government has put Ebola on the list of “banned diseases” but hasn’t taken any steps to put together a screening process or bar immigration from Ebola-stricken nations into the U.S.
“It’s all under the executive branch’s authority how to manage that,” Vaughan said. “They should be working with public health experts on how to detect the disease and for what period of time people should be cleared for. But my understanding from listening to the reports about this case in Dallas is that it’s the airline that’s having people fill out reports and taking their temperature. From what I’ve read that’s not enough."
"People have to have not had contact with an infected person for 21 days and that’s not happening--there was one member of Congress who had asked for a total travel ban to and from these countries and that’s the most aggressive approach we could do, say we are simply not going to admit people who have been in these countries in the last three months," she continued. "That’s what one congressman asked for. That’s the safest thing to do--but if you don’t want to do that, you could do other things like requiring a physician’s clearance and work with that physician and people have to show they haven’t been in touch with someone for 21 days and are fever-free for 21 days.”
The statute explicitly states that “any alien” or legal immigrant or visitor, “who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance” or someone who is “who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in consultation with the [Secretary of Homeland Security])… to have a physical or mental disorder and behavior associated with the disorder that may pose, or has posed, a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others, or” is considered to be “inadmissible.”
As such, Burwell and Johnson--and the president--bear direct responsibility for not setting up such a system, she says. She also includes Kerry because the State Department has broad latitude with regards to the issuance of visas to people who wish to either visit or immigrate from these nations.
“In visa issuance, DHS has always had this slight edge over State, but if John Kerry wanted something it’d get done,” Vaughan said. “And they [DHS and HHS] could tell Kerry at the State Department what to do. But I think Kerry bears responsibility here too because they [the State Department] know what the conditions are on the ground in those countries.”
But Vaughan said the Obama administration has done “nothing” to screen for Ebola getting into the U.S. or to stop visas from those countries.
“It seems to have been outsourced to the airlines. I don’t know if the State Department has ceased issuing visas-I certainly have not heard that,” she said, adding that if any actions have been taken it would have been publicly announced by the administration. The only announcement the administration made on Liberia so far is that it is suspending deportations of illegal aliens in the U.S. from that country so those people don’t contract the disease upon their return. Vaughan says that means Obama is protecting illegal aliens from Ebola but not doing anything to protect Americans from the disease.
“But one thing they did announce was they were suspending deportations to Liberia in order to protect the criminal aliens who are living here from having to go back to their own country and catch this disease,” she said. “We keep hearing from the CDC that there’s almost no way to catch it, and yet we’re protecting people from deportation? We don’t protect people from deportation to countries that have high rates of HIV or Tuberculosis? This is supposedly harder to catch than that, Tuberculosis."
"So we’ve taken steps to protect illegal aliens from catching this in their home country but there hasn’t been anything done to protect Americans because there already are about 200,000 people who have been issued visas to travel here," Vaughan stated. "Even if you stopped issuing visas today, there are already 200,000 people who have been issued visas to come here.”
Vaughan said if the administration actually had a plan earlier, the case in Dallas would likely not exist.
“If they had stepped in earlier with a more robust prevention plan, presumably this case from Dallas would not have happened,” she said, adding that Duncan--the man with Ebola in Dallas--should have been stopped from entering the United States.
“First of all, he is what we call a third-country national -- someone applying for a non-immigrant visa outside their country of citizenship,” Vaughan said. “That is a red flag, because it means that the applicant’s ties to the country in which he is living are assumed to be weak. Add to that the fact that he is apparently a young single unemployed male Liberian living in Ghana and a citizen of the country that has one of the highest visa overstay rates of any country in the world and he already has a close family member in the US, and this was his first trip to the US."
"There are many factors weighing against issuing this visa under any circumstances, regardless of the Ebola problem," she explained. "Personally, I am comfortable saying that I probably would not have issued this man a visitor’s visa at all. This guy was a visa overstay waiting to happen.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...tting-Into-U-S
Ebola Victim's Nephew: I Had to Call CDC
Ebola Victim's Nephew: I Had to Call CDC
BY M. ALEX JOHNSON AND KATE SNOWOfficials Are
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the Ebola virus in the U.S., wasn't appropriately treated for suspected infection until after his nephew personally called the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nephew told NBC News on Wednesday night, saying he hoped "nobody else got infected because of a mistake that was made."
Health officials have acknowledged that Duncan, 42, was initially sent home from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas when he showed up on Sept. 26 complaining of fever and abdominal pain. He was sent home and had to return two days later in an ambulance.
That was the day "I called CDC to get some actions taken, because I was concerned for his life and he wasn't getting the appropriate care," Duncan's nephew, Josephus Weeks, told NBC News on Wednesday night. "I feared other people might also get infected if he wasn't taken care of, and so I called them to ask them why is it a patient that might be suspected of this disease was not getting appropriate care?"
Weeks said the CDC referred him to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, which spoke to him and then took appropriate action. "I called the CDC and they instructed me of the process, and that got the ball rolling," Weeks said.
A CDC spokesman told NBC News the agency could neither confirm nor deny Weeks' account. The hospital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Duncan, a Liberian national, may have contracted the virus in Liberia while taking a deathly ill neighbor to the hospital four days before he flew to Dallas to visit family members, The New York Times reported.
"I'm not angry," Weeks said. "It's more frustration and concern. ... I'm hoping that he can get the same kind of treatment that was given to the four other patients that survived, and that's my concern, and that's why I'm still asking about it."
As for Duncan, who was reported to be stable in serious condition, "he's still in pain," Weeks said. "He's doing all right. He's a fighter."
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebo...ll-cdc-n216326
