CDC insists, 'We know how to stop Ebola spread'

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control

NEW YORK – During a teleconference media advisory, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, praised health officials in Dallas and expressed the CDC's continued confidence Ebola was under control in the United States.

"We know how to stop Ebola before the distribution of the disease becomes widespread," Frieden explained in the media advisory on Saturday, the fifth day after Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Texas.

Other highlights were the disclosure the CDC was engaged in "contract tracing" nearly 50 individuals, including 9 definitely known to have had contact with Duncan.

The family and other members of the household Duncan was visiting in Dallas have been moved out of their apartment to a home in an undisclosed location.

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Finally, the CDC confirmed 20 quarantine stations have been set up in major airports and ports of entry around the United States, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the airlines, to provide U.S. Customs and TSA officials with an isolated medical environment in which to confine air travelers detected with fever or other symptoms suspected of having Ebola.

In fact, as the CDC teleconference was concluding, ABC News reported from New York that a CDC crew in full HAZMAT gear removed two passengers from a United Airlines flight that arrived in Newark, N.J., from Brussels.

Duncan had originally arrived at Washington-Dulles on a United Airlines flight from Brussels on Sept. 20.

Nonetheless, Frieden contended, "Nothing we have done in Liberia or the United States would have changed the current situation because Mr. Duncan did not have fever or other symptoms during the time when he was boarding the airplane in Liberia or until four days after he had arrived in Dallas."

While he was confident the outbreak of Ebola would be contained in Dallas, Frieden also conceded it was probably not possible to get to a "zero risk" of the disease spreading.

Frieden gave a detailed account of the CDC contract tracing being done in Dallas in an attempt to contain the current incidence of the disease in Dallas to Mr. Duncan.

"As of the end of the day yesterday, we have assessed 114 people who may have had contact with the infected person, and we have identified 9 individuals who we are pretty sure are definite contacts with the source patient [Thomas Eric Duncan]," Frieden said.

He explained the 9 individuals include family members and some health care professionals, including some of the ambulance staff that rode with the patient.

In addition there are about 40 other people that CDC cannot rule out from having contact.

Frieden indicated that none of these nearly 50 people had fever or showed any symptoms of Ebola, stressing that those individuals determined to have had contact with Duncan will be traced for 21 days, the maximum incubation time for Ebola to develop.

Some 100 cases around the country have been referred to the CDC as possible Ebola cases, and the CDC has assisted a dozen laboratories around the country to do high-quality Ebola testing, but the CDC stressed cases referred to the CDC as possible Ebola cases should have not only symptoms of the disease including fever, but also a patient history that includes travel in the last 21 days from one of the three West African countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak, namely Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Frieden made a strong appeal that imposing an air travel risk on the affected West African countries was not an appropriate way to get to "zero risk."

"We must be careful that our responses do not end up making it more difficult to get the medical assistance into West Africa that we need to contain the Ebola outbreak there," Frieden said. "Paradoxically, something we do to protect ourselves could end up increasing the risk."

For example, he noted, the African Union was willing to send hundreds of health professionals into West Africa to fight the disease, but their efforts were hampered for about a week when a flight was cancelled and the health professionals were stuck in a neighboring country.

"Senegal had taken that action to protect themselves by stopping all flights," Frieden commented, "but in effect that action made it more difficult to stop the outbreak in Liberia and elsewhere, potentially increasing the risk to Senegal."

Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins explained he personally helped move Duncan's family, described as his fiancé Louise and three unidentified males, from the small apartment they had been occupying to a secure location provided by a member of the Dallas faith community, a place Jenkins said was "a place I would be happy to see my family placed if I were in Mr. Duncan's situation."