Health Care Worker Tests Negative For Ebola In NJ, Stays In Quarantine

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A nurse has been quarantined at University Hospital in Newark for the possibility of Ebola has tested negative in a preliminary test, authorities said early this morning. Patti Sapone/NJ Advance Media /Landov hide caption

A nurse has been quarantined at University Hospital in Newark for the possibility of Ebola has tested negative in a preliminary test, authorities said early this morning.

A woman who was put in isolation at Newark Liberty International Airport remains under quarantine, despite a preliminary test that found she did not have the deadly Ebola virus.

The health care worker was isolated Friday as she returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa. She had no symptoms of the disease, but after she developed a fever, she was taken to a nearby hospital.

"The patient continues to be quarantined and remains in isolation and under observation at University Hospital in Newark," New Jersey's health department said early Saturday, in a statement announcing preliminary test results.

The health care worker returned to the U.S. on the same day that guidelines for handling possible exposure to Ebola were being tightened. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said that their states will institute a mandatory 21-day quarantine for anyone traveling from West African nations who has also had contact with an Ebola patient. (Update at 4 p.m. ET: Illinois is installing the same quarantine policy; Chicago's O'Hare airport is one of five that have been screening passengers from West Africa.)

"It's too serious a situation to leave it to the honor system of compliance," Cuomo said of the new requirement.

The shift seems to have caught the health care worker by surprise. In a series of tweets Friday afternoon, Dr. Seema Yasmin of the Dallas Morning News said the woman is Kaci Hickox, a nurse who was "being held against her will" at the airport where she had been returning from a month treating patients in West Africa.

Yasmin said Hickox is a friend who works with Doctors Without Borders. Relaying information from her, Yasmin said she was "distraught" and wasn't being given information about why she was not allowed to leave.

Update at 3:50 p.m. ET: Quarantined Nurse Writes About Her Experience

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Health Care Worker Tests Negative For Ebola In NJ, Stays In Quarantine

Should health care workers who treat Ebola in Africa be quarantined?

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(CNN) When doctors risk their lives and sacrifice their livelihoods to go to West Africa and provide desperately needed treatment to those suffering from Ebola, what should be their reward upon coming home?

Three weeks off, some say whether they like it or not.

The governors of New York and New Jersey instituted just such a policy Friday, announcing that airport screening will be stepped up in their states and that any arriving passengers whod recently been in the West African nations hit hardest by Ebola could be hospitalized or quarantined for up to 21 days sick or not.

Measures such as these would affect people who lived in or traveled to countries such as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where all but a handful of the more than 10,000 documented Ebola cases and almost 5,000 deaths have occurred. And it would also impact those who brought their medical expertise to West Africa, doing what they could to prevent more people from dying or spreading the disease.

So theres a tradeoff: Should the focus of American policy be to do everything to prevent anyone from the most ravaged regions from entering the United States, even if it discourages health care workers from going there?

On Saturday, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention said that it sets the baseline recommended standards, but state and local officials have the prerogative to set tighter policies.

When it comes to the federal standards set by the CDC, we will consider any measures that we believe have the potential to make the American people safer, the CDC said in a statement.

Some U.S. lawmakers, such as Rep. Andy Harris, favor a strict three-week quarantine. (That time duration is significant because it takes anywhere from two to 21 days from the time a person is exposed to Ebola to when he or she shows symptoms of it; if more time than that passes without symptoms, a person is considered Ebola-free.)

In return from being allowed to come back into the country from a place where a deadly disease is endemic, youd have to enter a quarantine facility and be supervised for 21 days, the Maryland Republican told CNN.

Some, though, think such a policy would be counterproductive. It might prevent some cases of Ebola in the United States over the short term, they say, but over the long run it could backfire if highly trained American doctors have even more incentive not to head to Africa to help corral the disease.

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Should health care workers who treat Ebola in Africa be quarantined?

Health care worker quarantined in New Jersey criticizes treatment

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NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- The health care worker now quarantined at a New Jersey hospital because she had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa is sharply criticizing the way she's being treated.

Kaci Hickox says in a first-person account in the Dallas Morning News she was stopped and questioned over several hours arriving Friday at Newark Liberty International. She says no one would explain what was going on or what would happen to her.

Hickox is a nurse who had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone. Officials say she was taken to a hospital after developing a fever; Hickox says she was merely flushed because she was upset.

She tested negative for Ebola in a preliminary evaluation. Hospital officials won't say if she will remain quarantined in the hospital for the entire 21 days.

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Health care worker quarantined in New Jersey criticizes treatment

Genomics Research Lab Planned For Branford

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The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is opening a satellite Genetic Testing Lab in Branford, in space formerly occupied by 454 Life Sciences.

The managing director of Mt. Sinai Testing Lab-Connecticut was vice president of research and development at 454, and the director of laboratory operations was the director of the sequencing center at 454.

The Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology announced the move in September, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy toured the facility Thursday and talked about the government incentives offered to the medical school.

The Department of Economic and Community Development gave it a $9.5 million subsidized loan and, if the institute meets hiring projections and reaches a staff or 142 people over the next five years, $7.25 million of the loan will be forgiven.

454 Life Sciences, the DNA sequencing machine company that had occupied the space, employed about 200 people in 2007, when it was bought by Roche for $155 million. Roche announced a year ago that it would close and lay off 100 employees.

Glenn Farrell, a spokesman for the Icahn genomics institute, said Mt. Sinai has been working for months to renovate the former 454 space and has shipped equipment there. The facility has hired 10 people, and is recruiting for about 10 more, including entry-level technicians, early career technicians, a quality assurance professional, managers and an accessioning specialist. He said it should open in December.

Currently, the Genetic Testing Lab in New York employs about 100 people. The largest part of its work is doing genetic screening for couples planning to have a child. The lab also does more comprehensive screening for patients whose illness is a mystery and cancer target-specific gene testing.

The Institute had 340 employees at the end of last year in New York, including 188 staff, 87 professors and 65 post-doctorate researchers. It has been aggressively expanding in all those areas, and in its 2013 annual report, boasted of recruiting a Yale University professor. Mt. Sinai's medical school is ranked in the top 20 nationally, and its genetics specialty is ranked 15th.

In New York, it is exploring genetic markers in cancer, autism, schizophrenia, colitis and Crohn's disease, congenital heart disease and Alzheimer's.

It outgrew its testing lab space in New York, and Farrell said New York City is a difficult place to find affordable space where you can expand quickly.

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Synthetic Biologists Create Paper-Based Diagnostic for Ebola

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Scientists say they can embed sophisticated genetic tests onto a piece of paper.

These slips of paper carry freeze-dried ingredients for simple scientific experiments.

Could complex genetic experiments one day be as simple to carry out as an over-the-counter pregnancy test?

Thats the idea behind new research from James Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University, who says hes been able to print the ingredients for simple DNA experiments on paper, freeze-dry them, and use them as much as a year later.

The work, described this week in the journal Cell by Collins and colleagues from Harvard, could lead to bandages that change color if an infection is developing, environmental sensors worn on clothing, or cheap diagnostics for viruses like Ebola.

The idea of inexpensive paper-based diagnostics isnt new. But so far, these tests have relied on traditional chemistry like pregnancy tests do (see Super-Cheap Health Tests and Paper Diagnostics). Collins says his work now extends the idea to precisely engineered genetic reactions.

The technology is an adaptation of a workhorse lab method known as a cell free system, in which the basic processes of a cellsuch as reading a DNA strand to make a proteinare carried out in a test tube.

The advance Collins made was to embed cell-free systems onto porous paper. His team added some essential enzymes as well as specially designed genes that make proteins, but only if theyre triggered by a matching strand of DNA or RNA.

Its a pragmatic, very big-deal improvement, says Julius Lucks, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Cornell University. Now we can ask What do we want to do [with it]?

Collins showed the system could detect the Ebola virus, whose genetic code consists of RNA. When his team added bits of Ebola RNA to paper test strips, the genetic material completed a circuit allowing production of a protein which stained the paper, causing it to turn dark purple in about an hour.

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Synthetic Biologists Create Paper-Based Diagnostic for Ebola

Intel futurist Brian Johnson to speak on technology in Tuesday lecture at Oregon State

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Brian David Johnson, the futurist at Intel Corp., will speak Tuesday at Oregon State University as part of the College of Business Deans Distinguished Lecture series.

As Intels futurist, Johnsons charge is to develop a 10- to 15-year vision for the future of technology. His work, called futurecasting, uses ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing.

In his lecture, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes after Greed? Johnson will explore the relationship between humanity and technology, and look at how technology reflects the mission and values of the societies that create it.

The lecture begins at 7 p.m. in the Austin Auditorium in the LaSells Stewart Center, 875 S.W. 26th St., Corvallis. The event is free and open to the public.

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Intel futurist Brian Johnson to speak on technology in Tuesday lecture at Oregon State