The airline passenger traveling from Sierra Leone to Newark Airport who was taken to the hospital after a source familiar with the response said she began vomiting and exhibiting a fever does not have Ebola, Hackensack University Medical Center said in a statement Tuesday.
The United Airlines passenger, who connected in Brussels before landing in New Jersey Monday, was reported to have a fever and was vomiting, both symptoms of the potentially deadly disease, the source said.
She was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center, where preliminary tests indicated she did not have the virus, authorities said. She was kept overnight into Tuesday "in an abundance of caution" and released from the hospital in the evening.
The patient's symptoms subsided while she was in the hospital, and she was said to be recovering well, hospital officials said.
Hackensack University Medical Center is one of the state's three hospitals assigned to handle potential Ebola cases. The emergency room entrance was blocked off as a precaution as the patient was evaluated overnight, also out of an abundance of precaution. .
Sierra Leone is among the West African countries ravaged by the Ebola virus. The Record newspaper reported the passenger was a health care practitioner who worked with Ebola patients there.
A Twitter user on board the plane said authorities had passengers fill out health forms and that responders were in hazardous materials suits.
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There were 248 passengers and 14 crew members on United Airlines Flight 45 from Brussels, said the spokesman.
Anyone who flies into Newark or John F. Kennedy airports from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea must have their temperature taken with no-touch thermometers upon landing and are also monitored for symptoms for 21 days.
Despite sporadic scares of possible Ebola cases in the tri-state in recent months, only one person has been diagnosed with the potentially deadly virus here: Dr. Craig Spencer of Hamilton Heights, Manhattan. Spencer was successfully treated at Bellevue Hospital in early November after returning from Guinea while working with Doctors Without Borders.
