An advertisement for donations to fight Ebola in Africa is displayed on a bus stop near the apartment building
An advertisement for donations to fight Ebola in Africa is displayed on a bus stop near the apartment building of the nurse who contracted Ebola, in Alcorcon, outside Madrid, October 8, 2014. Reuters

An unidentified laboratory technician is said to have been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus after a breach of protocol on Dec. 22. She is being constantly monitored at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta which is the United States' national public health institute and will be monitored for a span of 21 days which is the incubation period of Ebola.

CDC has said that the laboratory worker might have been exposed to the deadly virus when she was working with its specimens. The specimens were had to be inactivated before she worked with it but it looked like that the specimens contained live Ebola virus. Earlier, two other high-profile cases involving samples of anthrax and avian influenza being mishandled had taken place at the CDC. The incidents resulted in questioning about the safety practices that were being followed at the highly-respected institute.

According to ABC Online, a Ebola co-ordinator that had been named by US President Barack Obama in October to lead the Ebola response team from the US, Ron Klain, visited the CDC lab in October. His position as the Ebola response coordinator requires him to oversee the handling of the Ebola crisis in the US. He confirmed that only one technician had been exposed to the disease and that she hadn't showed any signs of the virus that has taken the lives of more than 7500 in West Africa.

Klain, said that the incident was unacceptable and added that the director of the CDC, Dr Tom Frieden had made a promise that a report of the investigation of the incident would be provided in a span of 4 weeks. He explained that there was no risk of possible exposure of the Ebola virus to either the public or to the larger CDC campus.

Klain said that for the last 20 years, Ebola was being studied and with no such incidents. He added that he and his team had processed more than 10,000 samples of Ebola during the present outbreak. He added that the Americans should be proud of the work that Dr Frieden and his team was doing at Atlanta.