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 "The nation is frightened, and people are frightened of this
disease," the U.S. cabinet secretary for health, Sylvia Burwell,
said on Thursday, a day after the death in Texas of the first person
to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Burwell told a news
conference that people were frightened because Ebola "has a very
high mortality rate. They're frightened because they need to learn
and understand what the facts are about that disease."
As the government prepares to start screening passengers from West
Africa for fever at five major airports over the next week, cleaners
at New York's LaGuardia Airport staged a one-day work stoppage over
what they say is insufficient protection for workers whose jobs
include cleaning up vomit and bathrooms. The cleaners will return to
work Thursday night.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said the goal was to
expand airport screenings for Ebola internationally to "as many
different checkpoints as possible."
The Ebola virus causes hemorrhagic fever and is spread through
direct contact with body fluids from an infected person, who would
suffer severe bouts of vomiting and diarrhea.
"We are always with feces and near garbage," Sharekul Islam, 20,
whose job cleaning airplane cabins at New York's John F. Kennedy
airport regularly exposes him to the type of waste and fluids that
can transmit Ebola.
Twenty-three Republican and three Democratic members of the U.S.
House of Representatives signed a letter to President Barack Obama
asking the State Department to impose a travel ban and restrict
visas issued to citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The Oct. 8-dated letter also asked U.S. health and border control
officials to consider quarantine of 21 days for anyone who arrives
from the affected nations after being exposed to Ebola, the period
in which they would show signs of illness.
It said the World Health Organization "is an organization of
unelected bureaucrats and political appointees of foreign countries.
It has no duty to protect the lives and well-being of Americans, as
you do."
WHO says nearly 4,000 people have died in the worst Ebola outbreak
on record, with a death toll averaging about 50 percent of cases
since March. An unrelated outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo has killed dozens.
Shares in Lakeland Industries, a maker of suits to wear while
handling hazardous materials, rose more than 50 percent on Thursday
on expectations of the disease spreading.
A Liberian man who flew on commercial flights from his home country
on Sept. 19 and died in Dallas, Texas on Wednesday morning had had
contact in Liberia with a woman who later died of the disease.
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In other examples of the concern over Ebola, a sheriff’s deputy was
admitted to hospital Wednesday after saying he may have been exposed
to the Liberian man. The deputy tested negative for Ebola, the state
health department said.
And on Wednesday, jail officials in Kenosha County, Wisconsin moved
a female Immigration Customs Enforcement detainee into medical
isolation after learning she was from Liberia, and despite her
showing no symptoms of the virus, the Kenosha County Sheriff's
Department said in a statement.
Her temperature was taken twice and she was monitored by nurses, the
department said.
Separately in Washington, a Republican in the U.S. Senate is still
holding up most of $750 million from the Defense Department's
request to shift $1 billion in war funds to fight Ebola. Senator
James Inhofe's approval as the top Republican on the Senate Armed
Forces Committee is needed, although other senior Republicans said
they backed the funds.
U.S. health officials, while answering questions about mistakes in
the treatment of Liberian man Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas and
overall preparedness for Ebola patients, have emphasized the need to
tackle the virus at its source in West Africa.
"This is a fluid and heterogeneous epidemic. It is changing quickly
and it’s going to be a long fight," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday at
a high-level meeting of major donors at the World Bank. Frieden
compared Ebola to AIDS and said, "Speed is the most important
variable here. This is controllable and this was preventable."
A Spanish nurse is in serious condition in Madrid with Ebola after
treating a priest who was repatriated from West Africa and died of
the disease, the first reported transmission outside of the region.
A British man suspected of contracting the virus died in Macedonia,
a government official said on Thursday.
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