Nurses at Dallas hospital describe poor safety measures with Ebola victim

Nurses at a Texas hospital where a Liberian man died of Ebola described a confused and chaotic response to his arrival in the emergency room, alleging in a statement Tuesday that he languished for hours in a room with other patients and that hospital authorities resisted isolating him.

UPDATE: Second healthcare worker tests positive for Ebola

In addition, they said, the nurses tending him had flimsy protective gear and no proper training from hospital administrators in handling such a patient.

The allegations, made under unusual circumstances, provided the first detailed portrait of Thomas Eric Duncan's second trip to the emergency room, where he arrived by ambulance days after doctors had sent him home with a fever, a headache, abdominal pain and a prescription for antibiotics.

Tuesday's claims came during a conference call with reporters in which none of the nurses from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital spoke or was identified to reporters. A statement outlining a litany of damning assertions was read by Deborah Burger, co-president of National Nurses United. The Oakland-based nurses union does not represent the Dallas nurses, who are nonunionized, but has been vocal about what it says are hospitals' failures to prepare for Ebola.

The Dallas nurses asked the union to read their statement so they could air complaints anonymously and without fear of losing their jobs, National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro said from Oakland. DeMoro refused to say how many nurses signed off on the letter or how many were on the media call, but she said all of them worked at Texas Health Presbyterian and had been involved in Duncan's care or had direct knowledge of what had occurred after he arrived by ambulance Sept. 28.

They were spurred to speak out after their colleague Nina Pham, a 26-year-old registered nurse, contracted Ebola while treating Duncan, according to DeMoro. She said the nurses were angered over what they perceived to be health officials' suggestions that Pham made a mistake that led to her exposure to the virus, which is believed to have killed more than 4,400 people in West Africa.

The nurses' statement alleged that when Duncan was brought to Texas Health Presbyterian by ambulance with Ebola-like symptoms, he was left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where up to seven other patients were. Subsequently, a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit, yet faced stiff resistance from other hospital authorities, they alleged.

Duncan's lab samples were sent through the usual hospital tube system without being specifically sealed and hand-delivered. The result is that the entire tube system was potentially contaminated, they said.

The statement described a hospital with no clear rules on how to handle Ebola patients, despite months of alerts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta about the possibility of Ebola coming to the United States.

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Nurses at Dallas hospital describe poor safety measures with Ebola victim