Calif. Patient Tested for Ebola

Health officials confident they can prevent disease spread
By Shelley Hazen,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 20, 2014 9:03 AM CDT
Calif. Patient Tested for Ebola
A patient at the Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center is in the process of getting tested for Ebola, officials confirmed Tuesday evening. Subscribe to KCRA on YouTube now for more:...   (KCRA News)

A patient in Sacramento is being tested for Ebola, but health experts still say there is little chance the disease will spread in the US. "We should take this one case not as something to inspire fear but to tell us the system is working,” one expert tells the Sacramento Bee. Nothing is known about the patient—including gender, whether he or she traveled to Africa, or has shown symptoms of Ebola. The patient is now at the Kaiser Medical Center in isolation in a negative pressure room; his or her blood is being tested "out of abundance of caution," SF Gate reports, and results will take several days.

"Our advanced health care system has appropriate protocols in place to prevent the spread of this often deadly disease," says the state's public health department director. But Ebola is still making people nervous: At Kaiser, people are upset they weren't made aware of the quarantined patient. "It doesn't just involve one person. If it gets out of hand, it could affect other people," one ER patient tells News10. But so far, no one suspected of having Ebola has actually tested positive, and two American patients who contracted the virus in West Africa are recovering, adds SF Gate. One California man has voluntarily quarantined himself after returning from Liberia, even though he has no symptoms: "I want to stay away from everybody," he tells the Bee. The outbreak has so far killed more than 1,100 people in Africa. (More Ebola stories.)

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