Another Ebola virus case in US, patient diagnosed in New York City

The United States has recorded another Ebola case, this time in a Doctors Without Borders physician who recently returned to New York from Guinea. He tested positive for the Ebola virus in New York late Thursday.

Craig Spencer. Photo: LinkedIn

He was identified as Craig Spencer, 33. He returned to New York October 17 and developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue on Thursday. He was then placed in isolation and treatment at New York's Bellevue Hospital.

His fiancée and two friends who had been with him in the two days before he arrived at the hospital have been quarantined.

Reports said that before becoming sick, Spencer had gone for a three mile jog, may have gone to a restaurant, traveled through the city's subway system to Brooklyn where he went bowling, and returning to his Upper Manhattan home in a car hired through the taxi service, Uber.

Although authorities are stressing that the likelihood of him spreading the virus was low, the case has raised complicated logistical issues of how to trace his possible contacts in a city of more than 8 million people who travel daily from surrounding suburbs and states using the city’s sprawling mass transit system.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters late Thursday: "We want to state at the outset there is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed"

New York City's health commissioner, Dr. Mary Travis Bassett, said Spencer completed his work in Guinea on October 12, left two days later via Europe and arrived John F. Kennedy Airport on October 17.

According to Basset, the patient showed no symptoms during his journey or any time afterward until Thursday morning. He had been checking his temperature twice a day.

Governor Andrew Cuomo who joined De Blasio and Bassett at a news conference said: "We are as ready as one could be for this circumstance," adding that the situation in New York was not the same as the one in Dallas, Texas, where a man from Liberia was diagnosed with Ebola and two health care workers who treated him later contracted the virus.

"We had the advantage of learning from the Dallas experience," Cuomo said.