Nurse may sue over quarantine.

Byline: Kate Zernike and Emma G. Fitzsimmons

A nurse who cared for Ebola patients in Sierra Leone was headed for a legal showdown with the state of Maine on Wednesday over whether the state can quarantine her against her will.

The dispute is heightening a national debate over how to balance public health and public fears against the rights and freedoms of health care workers, and troops returning from West Africa.

"This is a tipping point in this whole process,'' the nurse, Kaci Hickox, said in an interview, one of several she did from her home in northern Maine on Wednesday, as state troopers and television trucks stood outside. "So many states have started enacting these policies that I think are just completely not evidence-based. They don't do a good job of balancing the risks and benefits when thinking about taking away an individual's rights.''

But Maine's health commissioner, Mary Mayhew, said at a news conference late Wednesday that the state was seeking an immediate court order enforcing a 21-day quarantine of Hickox after she declared that she would leave her home if state officials did not lift the restrictions by Thursday morning.

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

California also issued tough new rules on Wednesday.

Hickox's defiance put the focus for the next few days on one of the most remote reaches of the country, a home she shares with her boyfriend in the border town of Fort Kent. If she indeed leaves the home on Thursday and state officials subsequently detain her, she will have three days to seek a court order to challenge the quarantine.

Her lawyers, in New York, said they intended to fly to Maine to do so in that event.

Hickox, 33, returned last Friday from a month treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone with the rescue 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, though she had not previously registered a fever and has not since.

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