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The Utah Department of Health is monitoring an aid worker who returned from Liberia earlier this week for signs of Ebola.
Karen Mathot, who runs the Utah-based nonprofit Lifting Liberia, says she is showing no symptoms of Ebola, but is required to report her temperature and any symptoms daily.
A second Utahn also is being monitored, but state health officials declined to provide any details about that person, including when they returned to the state from west Africa, citing patient privacy requirements.
Mathot, who lives in Murray, returned Tuesday from Liberia's capital city of Monrovia. She told reporters upon her return that health officials were keeping tabs on her. Her temperature is normal but she said she's taking extra precautions: She is avoiding shaking anyone's hand or going to any parties until Nov. 17, when the 21-day Ebola incubation period ends.
"I have to go to the grocery store because I have children to feed," she said. "But I'm not going out to social gatherings."
In recent weeks, Mathot helped to set up health care, school and counseling services for children whose parents had died from the disease. None of the children she worked with were showing symptoms, she said.
Mathot has traveled to and from the country for about seven years.
Ebola has a 21-day incubation period. Federal officials stress that it is transmitted only through bodily fluids.
The second person being monitored by county health workers traveled separately from Mathot. Officials are not releasing that person's name, date of return to the U.S. or where he or she lives, said Department of Health spokesman Tom Hudachko.
State leaders learned about the travelers from the Centers for Disease Control, which is monitoring flights from west Africa and alerted Utah a half-day before they arrived back in town.
Mathot and the other traveler are taking their temperatures and reporting them daily to their local county health departments.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, like most governors nationwide, has avoided imposing a quarantine on people traveling from Ebola-stricken parts of West Africa. The governor had no immediate plans to do so on Thursday.
"At this time, we have adequate policies and protections in place," spokesman Marty Carpenter said in a statement. "But we will take necessary action to protect the public health."
A handful of states now require medical workers and others returning from the Ebola hot spots of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to quarantine themselves at home.
Doctors Without Borders volunteer nurse Kaci Hickox is fighting the state of Maine's attempts to keep her quarantined in her house. Hickox was quarantined in a tent at a New Jersey hospital last week after returning from Sierra Leone.