The Obama administration has told the governors of New Jersey and New York that there are "concerns" about the mandatory quarantines they have imposed on health care workers returning to the U.S. after caring for Ebola patients in West Africa.
The issue has become something of a flashpoint, after a nurse who returned from West Africa where she was treating Ebola patients said today she's being treated like a "criminal," quarantined in a New Jersey hospital for 21 days despite showing no symptoms of the virus.
Kaci Hickox today told CNN she is being held in a "tent structure" outside of University Hospital in Newark, N.J., "with a port-a-potty like structure and no shower and no connection to the outside world except my iPhone."
Her lawyer, Norman Siegel, is planning to file a federal suit to challenging her confinement if he cannot get her released, he told ABC News.
In an oped she who wrote for the Dallas Morning News, she said that after she told an immigration official at Newark Liberty International Airport that she was returning from Sierra Leone, she was escorted to a quarantine office where she was interrogated by a number of officials, including one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The nurse was taken to the hospital under a new rule issued by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that any health care workers returning from West Africa who had contact with those suffering from Ebola face a mandatory 21-day quarantine.
New York, Illinois and Florida have instituted similar rules, but a senior administration official today said federal officials "have been taking a close look" at those policies and are working in new guidelines for handling these cases.
"We have let the governors of New York, New Jersey, and others states know that we have concerns with the unintended consequences of policies not grounded in science may have on efforts to combat Ebola at its source in West Africa," the official said.
"We will continue to consult with the states as these guidelines are developed, and we expect to have more to say on this in the coming days," the official said.
Medical experts say that there is no reason for mandatory quarantines, since unless a person is showing symptoms of Ebola, they are not contagious.
"As a scientist and as a health person, if I were asked I would not have recommended [mandatory quarantines]," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said today on "This Week."
Christie has said he concluded the quarantine was necessary to protect public health in his state and that he thinks the CDC "eventually will come around to our point of view on this."
Fauci and other critics of mandatory quarantines are counting on "a voluntary system with folks who may or may not comply," Christie said.
In an interview today on "Fox News Sunday," Christie said that CDC protocols have been "shifting" and pointed to an incident in Princeton when a journalist and her crew who had been to West Africa and had been told to self-quarantine went to a restaurant to get takeout food and were "walking around the streets of Princeton."
Fauci said health care workers who return to the U.S. after treating Ebola patients -- like Hickox and Dr. Craig Spencer, a New York doctor currently quarantined in Bellevue Hospital -- are responsible and know that if they have symptoms it is possible they could transmit the disease.
"They don't want to get anyone else infected," he said.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
PHOTO: A University Hospital Emergency Preparedness Unit vehicle is seen where a person was being checked for Ebola at University Hospital in Newark, N.J., Oct. 22, 2014.
Hickox said today she feels "physically strong." She said she has tested negative for Ebola, and no one has indicated to her how long she will stay under quarantine.
"Even to this day no one has told me how long it will last, if I will be retested," she told CNN. "This is unacceptable. I want answers for what is my clear plan."
Dr. Richard Besser, ABC News' chief health and medical editor, said he finds the quarantine of Hickox baffling.
"When you read her letter, it's actually chilling to thing that someone who risked their life and went over the West Africa to try and help people and stop this epidemic, when she arrives in the U.S. is treated so poorly," he said. "She describes a situation where it was hours before people explained what was going on and why she was being isolated. This is someone who was not sick and is being treated as if she is in essence a leper."
Besser said that a better approach would be that taken by Doctors Without Borders, the organization that has taken care of more Ebola patients than any other in the world. Their health care workers monitor themselves for 21 days, and if they show any symptoms, they are isolated and they're tested.
"With that approach, they've never had a health care worker spread the disease to anyone else. So why we have to go above and beyond that, it just baffles me," Besser said.
That was the approach taken with Spencer, who treated patients in Guinea and self-monitored when he returned to New York City. He had no symptoms until Thursday morning, when he had a fever. At that point he contacted the CDC and has since been quarantined.
His fiancee, Morgan Dixon, and two other people he came into close contact with have also been quarantined, but they haven't shown any symptoms.
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PHOTO: Kaci Hickox, a nurse, is shown in this undated photo. She was the first person in New Jersey placed under a mandatory 21-day quarantine for people who had direct contact with Ebola patients.
Besser said that the mandatory quarantines not only do not seem medically necessary, they encourage the public to believe falsely that Ebola is easily communicable.
"The other downside on these mandatory quarantine is it sends a mixed message to the public," he said. "When you see people being isolated who don't have any symptoms it raises the idea of 'well, maybe it's easier to get this infection than people are telling us otherwise people wouldn't be locked away when they're not having any symptoms.'"
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