Nurse Kaci Hickox who was returning from Sierra Leone via Newark Airport in New Jersey on Friday called her treatment a "frenzy of disorganization," according to the Dallas News.
Hickox said she was confronted with hours of questioning just because of a misdiagnosed fever, the Dallas News reported. Hickox said she was then transferred to an isolation tent at the University Hospital in Newark.
In an essay published by The Dallas Morning News on Saturday, Hickox wrote she was worried about the care that is in store for future health care workers coming back from working in Ebola-infected countries, according to The Associated Press.
"I ... thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal. Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?" Hickox wrote in the essay published on the Dallas Morning News website.
"I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine," Hickox continued. In an phone call with CNN, Hickox said her treatment was "inhumane."
"To quarantine everyone, in case, you know, when you cannot predict who may develop Ebola or not, and to make me stay for 21 days, to not be with my family, to put me through this emotional and physical stress, is completely unacceptable," Hickox told CNN. "I feel like my basic human rights have been violated."
According to New Jersey's health department, Hickox showed a fever soon after being quarantined at the airport and was taken to University Hospital in Newark, but in her essay, Hickox says that is not what happened. Hickox said her temperature was normal when tested orally at the hospital, and a preliminary test for Ebola was negative, the Dallas News reported. Hickox only showed a fever when she was tested using a non-contact forehead scanner, she said in the essay, adding that she registered a fever only because she was flustered and anxious.
Hickox was working for Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone when she contracred the virus, according to the AP.
The same "unroganized" quarantine Hickox underwent is being introduced in New York and New Jersey, the AP reported.
Those who have come in contact with Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea for any reason will be quarantined for 21 days after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport or Newark Liberty International Airport, according to the AP. The governor of Illinois announced the state is adopting the same mandatory quarantine.
Hickox's said she worried the mandatory quarantines could discourage Americans from traveling to help control the epidemic, the Dallas News reported.
