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Family Says Nurse Amber Vinson Free Of Ebola

Amber Vinson in a photograph taken earlier this week at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Officials at Emory University Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn't detect Ebola in Amber Vinson as of Tuesday evening, her family said in a statement.
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Amber Vinson in a photograph taken earlier this week at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Officials at Emory University Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn't detect Ebola in Amber Vinson as of Tuesday evening, her family said in a statement.

A Texas nurse who contracted Ebola while treating Thomas Eric Duncan in a Dallas hospital is now free of the potentially deadly virus, her family says.

Amber Vinson, 29, remains in treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, but her family said in a statement that since Tuesday evening, doctors had been unable to detect traces of the disease in her blood.

"We all know that further treatment will be necessary as Amber continues to regain strength, but these latest developments have truly answered prayers and bring our family one step closer to reuniting with her at home," Vinson's mother, Debra Berry said in a statement.

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Vinson traveled to the Akron area Oct. 10-13 to prepare for a wedding and was diagnosed on her return to Dallas. Health officials are monitoring 164 people in Ohio who may have had contact with Vinson for signs of the disease, which has a 21-day incubation period.

Fellow nurse Nina Pham, 26, who along with Vinson contracted Ebola treating Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian hospital in Dallas, was upgraded to "good" condition earlier this week. She is being treated at a facility at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.

Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance photojournalist who contracted Ebola while working for NBC News in West Africa and was subsequently flown to Nebraska for treatment, has also tested virus-free, hospital officials said Tuesday.

Shortly after an announcement by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of new measures that would require a three-week monitoring period for anyone arriving in the United States from Ebola-affected Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea, President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he's "cautiously optimistic" about the ability of his Ebola response team to contain the disease inside the U.S.

A new Associated Press-GfK poll released today indicates that most Americans have some confidence that the U.S. health care system will prevent an Ebola epidemic on U.S. soil.

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The Associated Press reports:

"Nearly a quarter of Americans are very confident the U.S. health care system could prevent Ebola from spreading widely, and 40 percent are moderately confident." "But nearly half don't think their local hospital could safely treat an Ebola case, and 31 percent are only moderately confident that it could."

The World Health Organization's latest Ebola situation report says as of the end of Oct. 19, Ebola has caused 4,877 deaths.

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