Maine Officials Fail to Reach Compromise With Nurse Over Ebola Quarantine

FORT KENT, Maine - A nurse who cared for Ebola patients in Sierra Leone defied a state-imposed quarantine Thursday morning, leaving her house for a short bicycle ride and setting up a legal fight with the State of Maine.

The nurse, Kaci Hickox, left her house on the edge of Fort Kent just after 9 a.m., biking with her boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, down a quiet paved road, followed closely by two police cars and a caravan of reporters.

The couple rode less than a mile, then turned onto a graded gravel trail on a former railroad right-of-way flanked by pines. One police car, which has been posted outside her house for days, followed slowly behind. Ms. Hickox and her boyfriend, wearing jackets in the crisp Maine morning, returned to the house an hour later.

It is not clear how Maine officials will respond. State officials said Wednesday that they would seek a court order to enforce a 21-day quarantine if Ms. Hickox left the house.

'While we certainly respect the rights of one individual, we must be vigilant in protecting 1.3 million Mainers, as well as anyone who visits our great state,' Gov. Paul R. LePage, a Republican, said in a statement on Wednesday.

In Maine and elsewhere, the fight over Ebola was poised to be one of the final defining moments of the midterm elections, with Mr. LePage in a close race for re-election, along with governors from both parties in other states that have imposed quarantines, including Connecticut, Georgia and Florida.

Ms. Hickox has said the quarantine is unnecessary and counterproductive.

'So many states have started enacting these policies that I think are just completely not evidence-based,' she said in an interview Wednesday. 'They don't do a good job of balancing the risks and benefits when thinking about taking away an individual's rights.'

Norman Siegel, a prominent civil rights lawyer who is representing Ms. Hickox, said Wednesday that 'in our view she is not restricted to do anything.'

Ms. Hickox's defiance put the focus for the next few days on one of the most remote reaches of the country, Fort Kent, a Canadian border town where the nurse shares a home with her boyfriend. If detained by officials, she will have three days to seek a court order to challenge the quarantine.

Ms. Hickox, 33, returned last Friday from a month treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone with the group Doctors Without Borders. She was isolated in a tent at a New Jersey hospital after she registered a low-grade fever on a forehead scanner. She had not previously registered a fever and has not since.

Ms. Hickox has never shown symptoms of the virus and tested negative for it several hours after being quarantined; the disease is considered contagious only when a person displays symptoms. She was released Monday and allowed to travel to Maine after her lawyers threatened New Jersey officials with a legal challenge.

In an interview Wednesday, Ms. Hickox said that the stigmatization of health workers had 'exploded' across the country. She warned that quarantines would ultimately lead to families' being shuttered inside their homes and would deter aid workers from going to West Africa to treat Ebola at its origin.

'I understand how fear spreads,' she said. 'But if I'm a nurse and I have a patient in the hospital, it's our responsibility as medical professionals to advocate for our patients. Now, it's the medical professionals who are being stigmatized. Even if there is popular public opinion, we still have to advocate for what's right.'