Updated 6:40 p.m. 10/15/14
Senior U.S. officials are growing more worried about an Ebola outbreak that has now infected two health workers in Dallas, including one who traveled on a commercial airliner with a fever a day before being diagnosed with the disease.
The CDC is contacting all 132 passengers who were onboard the Frontier Airlines flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday along with a nurse who treated Thomas Eric Duncan before he became the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S. CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden bluntly told reporters on Wednesday that the nurse "should not have traveled" on the plane because she was one of dozens who were being monitored for exposure to the deadly disease.
That nurse has now been flown from Dallas to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment. She reported a fever of 99.5 on the day of the flight, Frieden said. The first infected health worker, Nina Pham, is staying at a hospital in Dallas, where officials say her condition has improved.
In an indication of the seriousness of the Ebola situation, President Obama cancelled a campaign trip planned for Wednesday afternoon to convene his Cabinet at the White House. The president told reporters after the two-hour meeting that the government would be monitoring the response in Dallas "in a much more aggressive way" and that he had instructed the CDC to dispatch "a SWAT team" of rapid responders to any hospital reporting a diagnosis of Ebola.