An unidentified patient being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta is now "free of Ebola virus disease" and was discharged Sunday from the facility, the medical center said in a statement released Monday afternoon.
The man, who has requested anonymity since being admitted to care at Emory's Serious Communicable Disease Unit on Sept. 9, now poses no threat to public health and has left the hospital for an "undisclosed location," the hospital added.
Emory had previously successfully treated two medical missionaries who became infected in West Africa, the site of the worst Ebola outbreak in history.
Also Monday, the American video journalist infected with Ebola while working in Liberia is improving and could be released from the hospital by week's end, doctors at Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha said. Ashoka Mukpo, of Providence, R.I, has been undergoing treatment at the hospital since Oct. 6.
The dual announcements followed more good news on the Ebola front in the United States: Dozens of people who had contact with the Dallas patient who died earlier this month are no longer in danger of catching the disease, health officials said Monday.
Those people include the fiancee and other family members of Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian native who contracted the disease in his home country before arriving in Dallas the previous month.
Also cleared were the paramedics who drove Duncan to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on Sept. 28 and health care workers who drew or processed his blood. And a mandatory quarantine was lifted for a homeless man who afterwards rode in the same ambulance as Duncan before it was disinfected, The New York Times reported.
All told, the 21-day monitoring period ended Sunday and Monday for roughly 50 people, the newspaper reported.
An estimated 120 people remain under watch because they could have had contact with one of the three people in Dallas who came down with the disease. Besides Duncan, the other two include two nurses who treated him at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Federal health officials have said that symptoms of Ebola show up within 21 days of exposure to the virus.
Meanwhile, U.S. health officials are planning to tighten recommendations for health care workers treating Ebola patients.
The new guidelines, which haven't been formally unveiled, are expected to include recommendations for full-body suits and hoods "with no skin showing". There will also be stricter rules for removing equipment and disinfecting hands, and the designation of a "site manager" to supervise the putting on and taking off of equipment used while treating a patient, AP reported.