Federal public health officials recently contacted clinicians at the Nebraska Biocontainment Patient Care Unit in Omaha to determine if the facility could house Ebola patients if needed as the record outbreak in Western Africa continues.
The most shocking of the recent laboratory mishaps and biosafety breaches was the discovery of a long-forgotten cache of live smallpox in a lab storage area at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
As the first two cases of Ebola ever treated in the U.S. were recently admitted to a special containment unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, clinicians and public health officials continued to reassure a jittery public that infection control measures would prevent transmission and contain the virus.