A team clear the contents of the apartment of an Ebola infected health worker in Dallas. (Reuters)
A Texas health care worker who was diagnosed with Ebola should not have boarded a domestic flight in the days before she began to show symptoms, officials said Wednesday.
"She should not have traveled on a commercial airline," said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Thomas Frieden.
He told reporters that CDC guidelines outline the need for "controlled movement," and that does not include taking any kind of public transportation.
He also noted that the woman was self-monitoring for signs of Ebola symptoms, but that her colleague's diagnosis had not yet been announced when the she boarded the plane.
"At that point it was not known that there had been exposures in the care of the patient," Frieden said.
Both became infected while caring for a Liberian patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.
The second health care worker had flown on Frontier Air from Dallas/Fort Worth to Cleveland Ohio, on October 10 and returned on October 13.
She discovered she had a fever on Tuesday and was immediately isolated in a hospital.
Frieden said she was "ill but clinically stable" and that she would be transferred to Emory University hospital in Atlanta for treatment.
The first person to receive an Ebola infection in the United States, Nina Pham, is a nurse at the same hospital who also became ill after treating Duncan, who died of the virus on October 8.