A 63-year-old man from Nigeria died of a heart attack about an hour before the Arik Air plane landed at Kennedy Airport on Thursday.
He had been vomiting in his seat before he died. New York Post reported:
A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport Thursday with a male passenger aboard who had died during the flight after a fit of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday.
The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.
The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said.
During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.
“The door [to the terminal] was left open, which a lot of the first responders found alarming,” said the source.
“My understanding was that the passenger was vomiting in the seat,” King (R-LI) said.
“The CDC went on the plane, examined the dead body and said the person did not have Ebola,” King said.
Still Barack Obama won’t ban flights from Ebola stricken countries from West Africa.
A man who joked about having Ebola gets taken off the plane by men in Hazmat Suits.
Let’s see… a guy on an airplane jokes about Ebola and a full Hazmat response team shows up even though he explained he was joking. Another guy shows up in the emergency room in Dallas with “actual” Ebola and 103° fever. He’s sent home and dies.
Welcome to Obama’s America!
If you’re going to be flying soon and plan on making an Ebola joke, don’t. Yesterday at an airport in the Dominican Republic, a man who joked about having Ebola and recently visiting West Africa was taken off a flight from Philadelphia by men in blue hazmat suits. Before the men boarded the plane, a flight attendant warned passengers things would “look worse than they really are.”
“Once we landed in Punta Cana we were told by the flight attendants that there was a situation and that a passenger may have been in Africa and had Ebola. She was certain it was a hoax but they did not take any chances and had a full hazmat crew board the plane and take the passenger off. It was later confirmed that the passenger was never in Africa and after 2hrs we were finally able to get off the plane,” the caption on a a video posted by Patrick Narvaez and Jukin Media states.
So, the guy who joked about having Ebola was ripped off a plane by guys wearing hazmat suits, yet the CDC would argue the people who were on the plane sitting next to him would have been totally fine if he in fact did have Ebola. Makes sense.
Meanwhile, CDC Director Tom Friedman is out with an op-ed today tripling down on his position that travel restrictions from Ebola stricken countries should not be implemented.