MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Thomas Duncan’s neighbors in Liberia’s capital believe they know how he became infected with the Ebola virus.
They say Duncan was among those helping his 19-year-old neighbor when she began convulsing after complaining of stomach pain. Everyone assumed her illness was related to her being seven months pregnant.
Duncan and others lifted the woman into a taxi, and Duncan rode in the front seat as the cab took the woman to the hospital. She later died.
Within weeks, everyone who helped her that day was either sick or dead — victims of Ebola.
The disease is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, and all those who became ill after helping the woman had touched her. She turned out to have Ebola.
Duncan is now hospitalized in an isolation ward in Texas after falling sick with Ebola following his arrival last month on a family visit.
Liberian authorities today announced plans to prosecute him. They say he lied as he left the country, when he said he hadn’t come into contact with an Ebola patient.
But it’s not clear whether he had learned by then that the woman he tried to help had Ebola.
%@AP Links
059-a-17-(Stanley Gaye, president, Liberian Community Association of Dallas-Fort Worth, in AP interview Wednesday at Liberian community meeting)-“means, the doctors”-Stanley Gaye, president of the Liberian Community Association of Dallas-Fort Worth, says Thomas Duncan is fortunate to have started showing symptoms of Ebola in the U.S. rather than in Liberia. ((note length of cut)) (2 Oct 2014)
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123-a-15-(Dr. William Schaffner, infectious disease specialist, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in AP interview)-“lesson from that”-Infectious disease specialist Dr. William Schaffner at Vanderbilt University Medical Center says he’s troubled that the triage nurse for the Ebola patient in Dallas did not make sure others at the hospital knew he’d come from Liberia, but Schaffner says others at the hospital also should have asked where he’d been. (2 Oct 2014)
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APPHOTO XJD105: Stanley Williams, 3, and Tete Williams, 12, sister of Marthalene Williams, 19, the pregnant woman Thomas Eric Duncan helped when she became ill and who died of Ebola, walk in from of the group of flats where Duncan, a Liberian man now hospitalized in Texas, was a tenant on 72nd SKD Boulevard during his stay in Liberia, in Monrovia, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014. Since the announcement of his illness, Duncan has become a symbol of how Ebola could spread within the United States. Here in Liberia, though, he is just another neighbor infected by a virulent Ebola cluster ravaging this neighborhood of tin-roof homes along 72nd SKD Boulevard.(AP Photo/Jerome Delay) (2 Oct 2014)
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