Dr. Daniel Varga (left) appeared at a news conference Wednesday with County Judge Clay Jenkins and Mayor Mike Rawlings to announce that a second nurse had fallen ill with Ebola. (David Woo/Staff Photographer)
The chief clinical officer at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas will offer a mea culpa Thursday to a U.S. House committee over the initial misdiagnosis of the Ebola patient who died last week at the hospital.
A transcript of testimony by Dr. Daniel Varga was to be presented before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. It was posted online Wednesday. In it Varga apologized for not delivering the remarks in person.
“Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes,” the statement reads. “We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola.
“We are deeply sorry.”
Varga also expresses regret in the remarks that two nurses at Presbyterian were infected by Thomas Eric Duncan. He says it remains unclear how that happened in the case of the first nurse, Nina Pham, whom he described as “an extremely skilled nurse.”
“She was using full protective measures under the CDC protocols, so we don’t yet know precisely how or when she was infected. But it’s clear there was an exposure somewhere, sometime. We are poring over records and observations, and doing all we can to find the answers.”
It’s not clear when Varga says Pham was wearing the “full protective measures” because it came to light Wednesday that health-care workers treating Duncan didn’t wear hazardous-material suits for two days until tests confirmed the Liberian man had Ebola.
The remarks go on to lay out a sequence of events in Presbyterian’s response to the crisis.
Daniel Vargas Testimony by digitalaccess