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A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport
Thursday with a male passenger aboard
who had died during the flight after a fit
of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted
a “cursory” exam before announcing there
was no Ebola and turning the corpse over
to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep.
Peter King said on Thursday.
The congressman was so alarmed by the
incident — and by what he and employees
see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK
— that he fired off a letter to the federal
Department of Homeland Security
demanding more training and tougher
protocols for handling possible cases there.
The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had
boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos,
Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law
enforcement source said.
During the flight, the man had been
vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some
time before the plane landed, he passed
away. Flight crew contacted the CDC,
federal customs officials and Port Authority
police, who all boarded the plane at around
6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers
remained on board, the source said.
“The door [to the terminal] was left open,
which a lot of the first responders found
alarming,” said the source.
“My understanding was that the passenger
was vomiting in the seat,” King (R-LI) said.
“The CDC went on the plane, examined the
dead body and said the person did not
have Ebola,” King said.
“It was what I was told a cursory
examination. The Port Authority cops and
personnel from Customs and Border
Protection were there, and they were told
there was no danger because the person
did not have Ebola,” King said.
“But their concern was, how could you tell
so quickly? And what adds to the concern
is how wrong the CDC has been over the
past few weeks.”
Between 70 and 100 passengers a day
arrive at JFK from Liberia, Sierra Leone
and Guinea, the three West African
countries that are the epicenter of the
outbreak, King said.
“These individuals transit the airport with
the rest of the traveling population,
including using the restrooms,” King wrote
to Jeh Johnson, secretary of the
Department of Homeland Security, in a
letter Thursday.
“Only after they arrive at the Customs and
Border Patrol primary screening location
that they are separated and sent to
secondary inspection for a medical check
and to complete the questionnaire,” he
wrote Johnson.
King’s letter demands that Homeland
Security immediately beef up protocols for
what happens to potentially infected
passengers in flight and at the terminal
itself, prior to their reaching the screening
location.
The letter also demands that training and
safety equipment improve for the Port
Authority police and Customs and Border
Patrol officials who can come into contact
with high-risk passengers.
“I believe there should be a suspension of
direct flights and connecting flights from
these three countries,” King said. “And
maybe anyone with a visa from those
countries, and who has been living in those
countries, should be barred” from entering
the US, he added.
No other information was immediately
available about the deceased Nigerian
passenger.
Nigeria is 1,000 miles east of the three
West African countries suffering from an
Ebola outbreak, but has had 19 confirmed
cases of the deadly virus. The country has
had no new cases over the past month; the
World Health Organization has said that if
there are still no new cases of Ebola by
Monday, they will officially declare the
country “Ebola-free.”
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