New Jersey Nurse Quarantined for Ebola is Released

A US nurse was quarantined in New Jersey and was to be discharged on Monday, officials said. After she returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa, she was enforced quarantine in her state. The enforced quarantine sparked a furious backlash.

Kaci Hickox complained bitterly about being placed under mandatory quarantine Friday, claiming she was made to feel like a criminal after being isolated in a tent without a shower or flush toilet.

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Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced that the nurse was being released, a day after New York reversed strict new quarantine orders under pressure from the Obama administration.

Christie's office and New Jersey's department of health said the patient remained symptom free after testing negative for Ebola.

They said Hickox would be driven to her home state of Maine by private carrier -- not via public transport.

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Hickox, who was helping treat patients in Sierra Leone before her flying home via Newark International Airport in New Jersey, had been isolated in a tent outside the main hospital building.

She was made to wear paper scrubs and her tent was equipped with a hospital bed, non-flush chemical toilet and no shower.

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"I feel like my basic human rights have been violated," she told CNN on Saturday, insisting she was not contagious because she has shown no symptoms and tested negative for the disease.

Christie's office said that "every effort" had been made to ensure that she remained comfortable, with access to a computer, cell phone, reading material and "nourishment of choice."

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"She will remain subject to New Jersey's mandatory quarantine order while in New Jersey," it added

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, had criticized the quarantine, saying Hickox was a hero who had been disrespected.

On Sunday, the state of New York state ended a mandatory isolation period for people who had no contact with an infected patient but who were returning from Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa.

On Monday, a five-year-old child was being tested for Ebola at Bellevue Hospital, where New York's first confirmed case of the disease, Craig Spencer, is being treated in isolation.

Source-AFP