Updated Oct. 4, 2014 10:02 p.m. ET
Health officials said Saturday they have narrowed the number of people who had direct exposure to an Ebola patient in Dallas to nine family members and health-care workers, and that none have had any symptoms of the disease.
They and an additional 40 people who may have come into contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who is now hospitalized in Dallas, are being tracked in an all-out effort by federal and local public health leaders to prevent the lone case of Ebola from prompting an outbreak in the U.S. of a deadly disease that is devastating West Africa.
Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where Mr. Duncan is being treated, said Saturday afternoon his condition had worsened to critical from serious in the previous two days. They didn't provide any other details about Mr. Duncan's health.
While public health officials hope they have moved aggressively enough to cut off the possibility of an outbreak in Dallas, the case of Mr. Duncan has sparked fears that there could be more sick arrivals—and that the West African epidemic could jump continents.
In New Jersey, a man who arrived Saturday in Newark suffering from Ebola-like symptoms was found not to have the deadly virus, authorities said. The 35-year-old passenger traveled with his daughter on a flight from Brussels. The man's daughter showed no symptoms for the virus, officials said.
Two hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area that treated patients who traveled from West Africa said Saturday that the patients didn't have Ebola.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it has received numerous inquiries about possible Ebola cases.
A hazmat team cleans out an apartment in Dallas where Thomas Eric Duncan had been staying before being diagnosed with Ebola. Getty Images
Mr. Duncan was symptom-free when he arrived in Dallas, but then grew ill and was sick for four days before Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas admitted him on his second visit. A day after saying that doctors hadn't received Mr. Duncan's travel history on his first visit due to an electronic-records glitch, it changed its version of events, stating the information that he had come from Africa was in fact available to doctors.
Thomas Eric Duncan, shown in 2011, came into close contact with emergency medical technicians and five children after being sent home from the hospital. Associated Press
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas said in a terse clarification late Friday evening that Mr. Duncan's travel history was available to physicians as well as nurses in its electronic health records when Mr. Duncan first arrived at the hospital's emergency room on the night of Sept. 25, complaining that he felt ill.
That was a marked change from a statement sent out by the hospital late Thursday evening, which said that the hospital had "identified a flaw in the way the physician and nursing portions of our electronic health records interacted in this specific case," which had prevented the physicians from seeing the information nurses collected from Mr. Duncan that he had recently arrived from Africa.
Doctors sent Mr. Duncan home with a prescription for antibiotics when he initially visited the hospital. He was only admitted to the hospital three days later, on Sept. 28, when he returned via ambulance after his symptoms had worsened. He was formally diagnosed with Ebola two days after that, on Sept. 30.
By that time, Mr. Duncan had come into close contact with emergency medical technicians, and five children he had been around had attended Dallas public schools Monday and Tuesday. One child also attended a middle school on Wednesday, school officials have said.
The hospital provided no further information about what took place during Mr. Duncan's initial visit, raising questions about whether the facility had been on the lookout for potential cases of Ebola following warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC had earlier cautioned hospitals that the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which has killed more than 3,400 people, according to the World Health Organization, had increased the likelihood that patients from affected countries would come to the U.S., and that early recognition of potential Ebola cases in America was critical.
The hospital didn't respond to requests for additional comment on its clarification.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said Saturday that he had driven the woman Mr. Duncan had come to visit in the U.S. and "three brave young men" from their apartment to another home that officials secured through a faith-based organization. "I drove the family to their new temporary home, which is a place where I would put my own family," he said. He called them "brave good people who are concerned about the public health and obviously concerned about their own health."
The four were ordered Wednesday to remain in the apartment where Mr. Duncan fell ill. But the apartment, which hadn't been cleared of materials for days due to a lack of permits to move hazardous materials on Texas roads, was finally cleaned out by a Hazmat team Friday evening, and a vendor with the proper permit was set to move the materials in sealed containers to a final destination, Judge Jenkins said.
Meanwhile, Ashoka Mukpo, an American freelance journalist diagnosed with Ebola, was still experiencing relatively mild symptoms and remained on track to be flown to the U.S. from Liberia Sunday evening, his father, Mitchell Levy, said Saturday.
Mr. Mukpo, who is 33, and the fifth American known to have contracted Ebola while working in West Africa, started experiencing gastrointestinal problems over the weekend, along with continued muscle aches, fatigue, and fever. His condition remained fairly stable and his family believes he'll be headed to the U.S. before he exhibits more serious signs of the virus, according to Dr. Levy, who is director of Rhode Island Hospital's division of critical care, pulmonary and sleep medicine. He is also a professor of medicine at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
"That's a tremendous relief," said Dr. Levy, who has been in frequent contact by phone with his son, who is being treated in a facility run by Doctors Without Borders in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
Mr. Mukpo remained in good spirits, and was eager to return to the U.S., although the family knows there could be some tense days ahead, Dr. Levy said.
"He's going to get sicker before he gets better but that's the nature of this illness," he said.
Mr. Mukpo, who had just started working as a cameraman for NBC News, is scheduled to be picked up by air ambulance at 8:30 p.m. Monrovia time on Sunday and transported to the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. NBC is helping the family arrange for his transport home, while the U.S. State Department is coordinating the flight.
—-Yoni Bashan, Jennifer Levitz and Doug Cameron contributed to this article.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com, Miguel Bustillo at miguel.bustillo@wsj.com and Ana Campoy at ana.campoy@wsj.com
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