DALLAS — The Ebola patient here is “fighting for his life,” but public health officials remain confident about their ability to contain the disease and said no one else in the Dallas area has exhibited symptoms of it, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Sunday.
While expressing such confidence about the American effort, the director, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said on the CNN program “State of the Union” that in Africa, “the virus is spreading so fast that it’s hard to keep up.”
Frieden said that the condition of the Dallas patient, a Liberian man named Thomas E. Duncan, was “quite critical,” having been changed on Saturday from serious.
Officials here continued to scramble to contain the spread of the disease, monitor those Duncan came into contact with, and decontaminate the Dallas apartment where he had been staying with his girlfriend and three of her relatives.
On Sunday, authorities said they had found a homeless man who was among those being monitored, the Associated Press reported. The man reportedly rode in the ambulance that took Duncan to the hospital but later apparently went into hiding. Officials said the man had been monitored Saturday and was asymptomatic.
The man is not considered to be one of the 10 people who definitely had contact with Duncan but is part of a larger group of 38 people who may have been around the patient when he was showing symptoms, officials said.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins called the homeless man, whom he didn’t identify, a ‘‘low-risk individual,’’ the AP said. Jenkins said the man would receive a mental health evaluation and then placement in housing, where he can be monitored.
Prosecutors in Dallas are considering whether to bring charges against Duncan after reports that he had contact with a woman who ended up dying of Ebola in Liberia and later lied about that contact before boarding a plane to the United States.
“We are actively having discussions as to whether or not we need to look into this as it relates to a criminal matter,” Dallas County’s district attorney, Craig Watkins, said on NBC 5 on Sunday. “We’re working with all the different agencies to get to the bottom of it.” He did not elaborate on what those charges would be.
At the apartment where Duncan and the others had been staying, about 20 containers were filled with linens and other items. The containers were being stored “in an extremely safe and secure location, and guarded by Dallas County sheriff’s deputies,” said Sana Syed, a city spokeswoman.
The four others who had been living in the apartment — his girlfriend, one of her children, and two young men — were moved to a temporary home Friday and remain under orders not to leave. None of the four has reported any symptoms of Ebola, officials said.
Reached by phone, Duncan’s girlfriend, Louise Troh, 54, declined to comment Saturday.
Last week, Liberian officials said that Duncan lied about his history of contact with Ebola on an airport questionnaire meant to screen out passengers who might be carrying the virus, and he is subject to prosecution when he returns to the country.
The chairman of the Liberia Airport Authority said that when Duncan flew out of Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, on Sept. 19, he answered “no” to a question about whether he had contact with any person infected with Ebola in the last 21 days, the maximum period of incubation for Ebola.
In addition, Texas Health Presbyterian said Duncan was asked by nurses if he had been around anyone who had been ill when he first went to the emergency room there on Sept. 25, and Duncan told them he had not.
Both of those answers appeared to be contradicted by Duncan’s activities in the days before he left Liberia for the United States. In Monrovia, neighbors and the parents of Marthalene Williams, 19, a woman who died of Ebola, said Duncan had helped the family take her to and from a hospital on Sept. 15 shortly before she died. Some of the men and women who had direct contact with Williams, and who were also in contact with Duncan, have died in recent days, including Williams’s brother, Sonny Boy Williams, 21.
Duncan landed in Dallas on Sept. 20, and went to the emergency room feeling ill on Sept. 25. He returned to the hospital three days later on Sept. 28 after his condition worsened.
It was unclear how the threat of charges being filed against Duncan will be viewed by immigrants in the Dallas area. Liberians have already been on edge about coming into contact with anyone who may have been with Duncan.
Stanley Gaye, president of the Liberian Community Association of Dallas-Fort Worth, said some Liberian immigrants had told him they were concerned about being tested for Ebola because they feared being placed in isolation and having to skip work for the three-week incubation period.