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PHOENIX - Health officials are investigating whether a potent virus that has infected hundreds of children nationwide killed a six-year-old boy in Arizona, officials said on Wednesday, adding that it would take more than a week to get an answer. Officials said the tests are being conducted on the first-grader from Vistancia Elementary School in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria, to determine his cause of death and if he had been infected with the Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) when he died. "It's still too early to tell," said Jeanene Fowler, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. "There...

Open Borders, Quarantine Regulations, October Surprises It appears to me that the Obama regime’s “Theater of the Absurd” traveling snake-oil emporium has reached hitherto unexplored areas with their mishandling of the Ebola outbreak. The Obama Administration has lowered the bar so significantly, so consistently, over such a wide area, that I suspect (and pray) their performance will never be duplicated—but in the case of the Ebola outbreak they have really outdone themselves. I would call their handling of the affair up to now criminally negligent—but that’s just me. In the phrase “illegal immigrants” emphasis should fall on the word illegal,...

The man seen Wednesday wearing no protective gear while transporting an Ebola-stricken patient from Dallas to Atlanta works for the air ambulance company that handled the flight. Officials with Georgia-based Phoenix Air Group said its clipboard-carrying medical supervisor was OK to in work civilian clothes while everyone else on the scene donned full hazmat suits.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins criticized the CDC hours after it was revealed that a second nurse who came into contact with Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for the deadly disease, and that the new patient flew on a commercial flight to Ohio before she was diagnosed. Jenkins, the chief executive in Dallas County, said he is seeking an order to bar 75 hospital workers who may have come into contact with Duncan, who died of the disease last Wednesday, from taking mass transit. Early Wednesday nurse Amber Joy Vinson tested positive...

The health workers who treated Dallas’ first Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan should not have been allowed to move around, county health director Zachary Thompson said Wednesday. Thompson said that decision isn’t up to him — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are handling the monitoring of those workers. He said he hasn’t heard any discussion about quarantine. But if it was up to the county health department, the patients “wouldn’t have been able to move around,” Thompson said.

President Obama vowed a more “aggressive” federal response to the spread of Ebola in the United States. And he offered assurance tonight that a “serious outbreak” remains extremely unlikely. “I want people to understand that the dangers of you contracting Ebola, the dangers of a serious outbreak, are extraordinarily low,” he said after meeting with Cabinet members and other top aides. “But we are taking this very seriously at the highest levels of government.” That assurance that a “serious” outbreak is unlikely is markedly less optimistic than the one Obama offered only a week earlier in a call with governors...

Health care workers treating Thomas Eric Duncan in a hospital isolation unit didn’t wear protective hazardous-material suits for two days until tests confirmed the Liberian man had Ebola — a delay that potentially exposed perhaps dozens of hospital workers to the virus, according to medical records. The 3-day window of Sept. 28-30 is now being targeted by investigators for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the key time during which health care workers may have been exposed to the deadly virus by Duncan, who died Oct. 8 from the disease.

The Cambridge Christian School in Tampa is closing their high school for the rest of the week due to a high number of students sick. One-third of the school's 240 high school class students have come down with flu-like symptoms. Cleaning crews will spend the next two days cleaning and disinfecting the school.

A second health care worker tests positive for Ebola in Dallas. One of the men coordinating the response to the virus talks about the possibility of more cases in the health care community. "My job is the next 15 minutes", said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. "So I've kind of torn off the rear view mirror. Honestly, my job in this was everything but hospital care. Until Nina got sick. And now I've been looking at the hospital too. But I'm not a doctor. I'm not a hospital administrator. I was tasked with stopping this Ebola virus. And we thought...

We have one of the best health care systems in the world. The CDC assures us that the outbreak is under control. There have been only 2 new cases since the Liberian patient arrived.The 1918 flu epidemic killed more people than WW2. The mobilization of millions living in close proximity aided the spread of the virus. https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/Crowded conditions accelerate the spread of disease. Children crowded on trains moving through Mexico, and living in refugee centers in the US would cause the disease to spread more rapidly and allow the virus to rapidly enter the US. Why are our leaders gambling...

Officials on eastern Long Island say the Southampton Elementary School will be closed Wednesday after a student was confirmed to have a strain of enterovirus.

Sen. Ted Cruz called Tuesday for a ban on travelers from West African countries grappling with Ebola. “Common sense dictates that we should impose a travel ban on commercial airline flights from nations afflicted by Ebola,” he said by phone from Texas. "There’s no reason to allow ongoing commercial air traffic out of those countries.”

The news that another American child has died from the Enterovirus 68 epidemic sweeping our country’s schools and childcare facilities, and that an American health care worker has contracted the Ebola virus IN AMERICA should make every American voter demand that President Obama close our borders to travelers from countries where those diseases are endemic.It should be a natural alliance for Republicans – who claim to be the Party of people outside the Washington Beltway – to join with frightened airline workers, parents and health care workers to demand border security and immigration policies that protect them. And it should...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is pushing back against charges that Republicans are responsible for budget cut that have made it harder to contain the Ebola outbreak. “Obviously, this is just desperation on the part of this idiotic group,” Priebus said on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends on Tuesday, referring to the Agenda Project which released an ad that blames the GOP for slashing funding the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. (snip) Priebus fired back, saying, “They’re walking this dangerous path on trying to point out blame on Ebola when, in fact, if you...

Only a madman would gamble with our lives…our children’s lives…and the entire American economy. Why would President Obama play “Russian Roulette” with the future of our country? It’s a gamble no sane leader would take. The life and death issue is Ebola. The President is more concerned with political correctness (and golf) than taking common sense precautions to prevent a deadly pandemic. Why does this President not see his responsibility is to keep the odds as low as possible? There are three simple, common sense actions any President who cared about American citizens would take:

Of the 691 cases of EV-D68 confirmed from by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now in 46 states and the District of Columbia, 14 of these cases are in Texas. On October 9, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) confirmed that the children with EV-D68 were residents of Anderson, Bexar, Dallas (7), Denton, and Lubbock (4) Counties. One additional confirmed case was in a resident of another state. In Lubbock, the Avalanche-Journal reported an additional case on October 10, although it was not recorded with the DSHS. If confirmed, this would bring the Texas EV-D68...

He says the diagnosis of the worker - who's not identified - clearly shows that there was a breach of protocol.

A just-concluded press conference in Dallas, featuring grim-faced officials, revealed that the anonymous worker at the hospital who came down with Ebola followed all CDC procedures, including the use of an isolation suit. Nonetheless, we were told not to worry. Yeah, right. Are they trying to convince people that we are being lied to? When they as good as admit they don’t know how to prevent infections, then telling us to be confident in their medical response accomplishes just the opposite: it spreads panic. Meanwhile, we are lectured to trust them and to keep allowing people form the plague region...

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said there was "clearly" a breach in protocol that led to a Texas health care worker contracting Ebola after treating a Liberian man who later died from the virus, although authorities do not yet know what that breach was. "We're deeply concerned about this new development," Dr. Thomas Frieden said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "I think the fact that we don't know of a breach in protocol is concerning because clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the...

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins has presided for four years over a government with a budget of nearly $1 billion. He has met with President Barack Obama, and he has ordered airplanes to spray insecticide to kill disease-carrying mosquitoes. But after last week, his highest-profile action in office might be an evening drive. Jenkins made international news last Friday when he loaded the family of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan into a Ford Explorer and drove them to an isolated location where they could wait and see whether they had contracted the virus. He wore no protective gear during the...