A family of six has been quarantined in West Haven, Conn. after returning from a trip to West Africa, the city’s health director said.
The office of West Haven Mayor Edward O’Brien said the family, which returned to Connecticut on Saturday, was not showing any signs of Ebola, FoxCT.com reported. They were flagged by Transportation Security Administration officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport because of their travel to West Africa, although officials have not said which country they had been in.
The quarantine is precautionary and will last the standard 21-day period, a time frame during which health officials say symptoms would surface if anyone has contracted the deadly virus.
The family is staying in a residential home in the city, O’Brien said, although he did not say whether the family was city residents or visitors.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. There is no Ebola in West Haven,” O’Brien told FoxCT.com.
The family members are checking themselves for the virus and reporting to the state health department by phone.
The quarantine comes one day after the Centers for Disease Control announced that all travelers arriving in the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken African countries — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — will be subject to a 21-day monitoring program.
Returning travelers will have to give authorities an address, two phone numbers and two email addresses, as well as the address of a personal contact. They will get kits and be required to take their temperatures once per day and report to public health authorities, for 21 days.
The program will start Monday in six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia.
Meanwhile, several states are taking the Ebola crisis into their own hands, by tapping emergency funds in their budgets, launching treatment units and holding public hearings to stanch the spread of misinformation about the virus.
The lines of responsibility for what the federal government and what the states should be doing have blurred in recent days, amid questions over guidance initially provided by the CDC.
But the states touched by the outbreak scare, including Ohio where one Ebola patient visited before returning to Dallas, are scrambling to shore up their medical lines of defense.
