Culture

Someone In Cairns Is Being Tested For Ebola. Here’s Everything We Know.

Ruh roh?

by Alex McKinnon  9 October 2014

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

UPDATE: The nurse has tested negative for ebola. As you were.

–

At 2:36pm Cairns time (which is 3:36pm NSW and Victoria time because Queensland doesn’t do daylight savings for some reason), ABC Cairns reporter Sharnie Kim tweeted that a Cairns local was under observation in hospital over concerns she had contracted the Ebola virus.

ABC News picked up the news shortly after.

At 3pm Queensland time, Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeanette Young fronted a press conference in Brisbane, telling the media that a nurse who’d recently returned from a month volunteering with ebola patients for the Red Cross in Sierra Leone was admitted to Cairns Hospital with a low-grade fever. The nurse’s name was not released.

Dr Young said that the nurse had been quarantined in her home taking her temperature twice a day, in accordance with nationwide ebola prevention protocols, and that she had “done everything appropriately” and had not been out in the community. Blood samples have been flown to Brisbane, where they will be processed by Forensic and Scientific Services in Coopers Plains; results can be expected by late tonight or early tomorrow morning.

While the nurse does live with a housemate, Dr Young underlined how difficult it is for this disease to spread. “It’s not like the flu or measles, it’s not transmitted through the air. You need to be exposed to secretions, diarrhea, vomit, or blood … She doesn’t have any symptoms producing those secretions, so her risk of infecting someone else is very, very low.” According to Young, “there is absolutely no concern for any passenger on any plane she’s been on”, and “no risk for the people in Cairns Hospital, the staff or any other patients”.

Dr Young said a doctor in South Brisbane is also undergoing home isolation, as all people who return from West Africa have agreed to do.

The news — the second ebola scare for the sunshine state — comes on the same day the United States’ first ebola patient has died in Texas, with a second person admitted to hospital.

–