By Anna Driver
DALLAS (Reuters) - Weeks of worry about Ebola infection ended on Monday for several dozen people who came off watch lists in the United States, but more than 260 others were still being monitored for symptoms as the U.S. government ramped up its response to the virus.
In Texas, 43 people who had contact with Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States in late September, were cleared of twice-daily monitoring after showing no symptoms during a 21-day incubation period.
The Texas health department said they included four people who shared an apartment with Duncan and had been in quarantine. It said 120 people in Texas were still being monitored.
"There's zero risk that any of those people who have been marked off the list have Ebola. They were in contact with a person who had Ebola and the time period for them to get Ebola has lapsed. It is over. They do not have Ebola," Judge Clay Jenkins, the top elected official in Dallas County, said at a news conference.
Three people were still in quarantine in Ohio, among 142 under different levels of monitoring, the state health department said. The three in quarantine had direct skin contact with a nurse who visited the state after being infected while treating Duncan. Another Texas nurse also has Ebola and is being treated by the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH infectious diseases unit, said on Monday that the nurses "did not do anything wrong. Period," and that new protocols would come out within hours to a day.
"The way that was written was a risk for the nurses," Fauci told a "town hall" meeting sponsored by Washington news radio station WTOP. "They went by the protocol. They got infected.?
NEW GUIDELINES
The government's new guidelines were expected to tell U.S. health workers to cover skin and hair completely when dealing with Ebola patients. The old guidelines, based on World Health Organization protocols, said workers should wear masks but allowed some skin exposure. The virus is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people and it is not airborne.
The man newly appointed by President Barack Obama to oversee the response, lawyer Ron Klain, will start work on Wednesday with a mandate to ease anxiety over the virus and fix federal coordination with states to control its spread. He was invited to testify at a House of Representatives oversight hearing on Friday, a committee official said.
The United States and some European governments are checking selected airports for passengers travelling from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three West African countries worst hit by Ebola with more than 4,500 deaths.
In a similar move on Monday, Carnival Cruise Lines said passengers will be asked to fill out a questionnaire on whether or not they have experienced symptoms of fever or vomiting and if they have recently travelled to West Africa or had contact with someone known or suspected to have Ebola.
One Carnival cruise was denied docking by Belize and Mexico last week because a Texas hospital lab worker on board might have come in contact with test samples from Duncan, who died on October 8. The worker has tested negative for the virus.
While only three people have been diagnosed with the disease in the United States, the end of monitoring for some could ease widespread anxiety over Ebola in the country, where some lawmakers have called for a travel ban from West Africa.
"There's no question, today is a milestone day," Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said at a news conference.
Shares of small biotech companies, medical equipment makers and drugmakers related to Ebola research and preparedness were down between 8 percent and 21 percent after the news.
At the Catholic Conference Center in Dallas where Duncan's fiancée Louise Troh and the other three people closest to Duncan had been in quarantine, Bishop Kevin Farrell said they were relieved the isolation period was over.
"They felt like they were being persecuted," Farrell said.
Four of five Dallas school students who have been cleared by health authorities to resume regular activities following exposure to the virus returned to school on Monday morning, one day earlier than expected.
School district superintendent Mike Miles said that because the students "pose no health risk to any students or staff, we have no intent on sending them home. Their interest in getting back into school is encouraging."
The World Health Organization declared Nigeria free of Ebola on Monday after 42 days with no new cases, a success story for African nations struggling to contain the virus. Senegal was declared free of Ebola by the WHO on Friday.
On Sunday, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf urged stronger international action to control the epidemic, saying it was unleashing an economic catastrophe that would leave a "lost generation" of young West Africans.
(Additional reporting by Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Karen Brooks and Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, David Morgan, Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu in Washington and David Bailey; Writing by Jim Loney and Grant McCool; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Howard Goller, Toni Reinhold)
