(CNN) -- Running at full speed since the summer, a lab with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testing blood samples collected by American hospitals on patients they suspected of having Ebola, has returned a negative result in every case. Until Tuesday. Some public health officials are explaining the first confirmed case of the Ebola virus in the United States, found in a man in Dallas, as a predictable event. But at least for this case, there are many questions surrounding that assertion. Were crucial procedures that might have prevented the victim--who Liberian officials have identified as Thomas Eric Duncan, according to an article in the New York Times--from arriving in the United States not in place?
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Ford Vox: Some say discovery of Ebola in U.S. predictable; it didn't have to be
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He says screening procedures out of affected nations and into U.S. too lax
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Vox: Why not several weeks of health surveillance of travelers from those nations?
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Vox: Truthfulness of travelers crucial, but hospitals also must be better prepared
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As evidenced by numerous flights of returning aid workers and journalists, recent @placeholder contacts do not bar re-entry.
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I feel greatly for the quarantined @placeholder ambulance drivers and other community contacts whose lives are now upended as they wait in quarantine away from work life, income, and all other activities for three weeks.
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But it goes beyond lax screening: There is no effort to follow-up with potentially infected travelers after they arrive and begin circulating in @placeholder.
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CDC epidemiologists performing the painstaking "contact tracing" of the patient's movements for the four days he was symptomatic in the @placeholder community will depend on such openness from everyone they interview.
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@placeholder officials released Duncan's name Wednesday, irrespective of the hospital's deference to privacy.