Reuters) - A nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone but has tested negative for the virus ventured out of her home in Maine and took a bike ride on Thursday, defying a quarantine order and setting up a legal collision with state authorities.
Attorneys for Kaci Hickox, 33, said they had not yet been served with a court order to enforce a 21-day quarantine - matching the virus's maximum incubation period - but remained prepared to fight such an order if necessary.
Hickox left her home in the small Maine town of Fort Kent, along the Canadian border, and television news images showed her taking a morning bicycle ride with her boyfriend.
Hickox has said that she plans to take the issue to court if Maine, giving the state a deadline of Thursday to lift its order that she remain isolated at her home until Nov. 10.
Norman Siegel, one of the lawyers, defended Hickox’s decision to go for a bike ride as a public statement but noted that she avoided the center of town so as not to “freak people out.”
“Since there’s no court order, she can be out in public,” Siegel said. “Even if people disagree with her position, I would hope they respect the fact that she’s taking into account the fear, which is based on misinformation about the way the disease is transmitted.”
Medical professionals say Ebola is difficult to catch and is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person and is not transmitted by asymptomatic people. Ebola is not airborne.
Siegel also criticized Maine Governor Paul LePage for stoking fear of Ebola rather than using his bully pulpit to educate the public about the disease.
"People tell me politics isn’t involved in this?” the attorney said. “Give me a break.”
LePage, a Republican who is in a tough re-election battle, said he is seeking legal authority to keep Hickox isolated at home.
The nurse's confrontation with state officials in Maine, as well as in New Jersey, highlights how U.S. states have been struggling to protect their citizens from Ebola without resorting to overzealous, useless precautions or violating civil rights.
Hickox says she is completely healthy and has been monitoring her condition and taking her temperature twice a day.
She tested negative for Ebola after returning from treating patients in West Africa. Hickox previously blasted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie after she was taken from Newark's airport and put in quarantine in a tent before being driven to Maine to spend the rest of her 21-day quarantine at home.
Her town is in Maine's sparsely populated far north, more than 300 miles (480 km) from the state's largest city, Portland, and further north than Quebec City in neighboring Canada.
Hickox worked with the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone, one of the three impoverished countries at the heart of an outbreak that has killed about 5,000 people, all but a handful in West Africa. The disease causes fever, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea.
Some U.S. states have imposed automatic 21-day quarantines on doctors and nurses returning from treating Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of doing too little to protect Americans from the disease.
President Barack Obama's "Ebola czar," Ron Klain, was due to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said Obama should issue a guarantee to medical volunteers to assure them of help when they return to the United States.
"The president should guarantee that all U.S. citizens who travel to West Africa to help fight Ebola will be allowed to return to the United States, that any medical care they need as a result of their trip will be provided free of charge and that wages lost to any government-imposed quarantine will be reimbursed," Coons wrote in an opinion piece in Thursday editions of the Washington Post.
U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, said the fight over Hickox and the larger battle over isolation policies have deteriorated into political posturing just days ahead of next week's midterm elections.
"This is just fear. It's kind of understandable, but unfortunately it's just stirred up and caused by fear-mongering politicians who see poll-driven numbers in anticipation of Tuesday's election," Cohen told CNN after Hickox' outing. “This is strictly driven by politics and fear-mongering.”
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