WATCH ABOVE: For the second time this week, an Ebola patient is being moved from Dallas to a specialized facility in another part of the country. Omar Villafranca is in Dallas with the latest details.
WASHINGTON – Republican lawmakers indignantly criticized the government response to the arrival of Ebola on U.S. shores Thursday in a tense congressional hearing.
Top public health officials defended their actions as American public unease grew over the possibility of the deadly virus spreading widely here – something health experts insisted was a remote possibility.
“People are scared,” said Rep. Fred Upton, a Republican and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “People’s lives are at stake, and the response so far has been unacceptable.”
Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he remained confident in the ability of the U.S. health care system to combat Ebola.
“Working with our partners we have been able to stop every prior Ebola outbreak, and we will stop this one,” he said. “We know how to control Ebola, even in this period.”
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But even as he offered reassurances Frieden raised alarms of his own about threats to this country if the raging epidemic in West Africa, which has already claimed more than 4,000 lives, cannot be stopped.
“There are no shortcuts in the control of Ebola and it is not easy to control it. To protect the United States we need to stop it at its source,” he said.
“One of the things I fear about Ebola is that it could spread more widely in Africa. If this were to happen it could become a threat to our health system and the health care we give for a long time to come.”
Fears over the disease are on the rise as two nurses tested positive after caring for a patient in Dallas who died of the disease. One of them was cleared by the CDC to travel on a commercial plane after registering a slightly elevated fever, officials disclosed on Wednesday.
Nina Pham, a nurse who contracted Ebola after treating a Liberian man in Dallas, was being flown to the National Institutes of Health outside Washington on Thursday, while a second nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, has already been transferred to a biohazard infectious disease centre at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told lawmakers Thursday that the first nurse to fall ill, Nina Pham, was being transferred to the NIH near Washington for treatment. The second nurse, the one who took a commercial flight before being diagnosed, has been transferred to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta near the CDC.
Lawmakers had tough questions on hospital protocols and travel restrictions. Several Republicans suggested a partial travel ban for people who’ve been in West Africa.
Election-year politics were evident in the hearing room with balloting less than a month away. Two House members in highly contested Senate races, Rep. Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, and Rep. Bruce Braley, Democrat of Iowa, left the campaign trail to appear at Thursday’s hearing.
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President Barack Obama cancelled travel plans to stay at the White House and oversee government’s response to the Ebola problem.
Health officials said Thursday they still don’t know how two Dallas nurses caught Ebola from a patient, as criticism increased from lawmakers who questioned whether the U.S. is prepared to stop the deadly virus from spreading in the country.
The revelation that one of the hospital nurses was cleared to fly on a commercial airline the day before she was diagnosed raised new alarms about the American response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The death toll is expected to climb above 4,500 in Africa, all but a few within Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the World Health Organization said.
Countries around the world face similar challenges in Ebola fight
In Europe, Spain’s government is wrestling with similar questions. The condition of a nursing assistant infected with Ebola at a Madrid hospital appeared to be improving, but a person who came in contact with her before she was hospitalized developed a fever and was being tested Thursday.
That second person is not a health care worker, a Spanish Health Ministry spokesman said.
To this point, only hospital workers — the Madrid nursing assistant and the two nurses in Dallas — had been known to have contracted Ebola outside West Africa during the outbreak that began in March.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said a trust fund he launched to fight Ebola, with a $1 billion goal, has a paltry $100,000 in the bank. He appealed to nations to do more about a “huge and urgent global problem that demands a huge and urgent global response.” Some $20 million has been spent from the fund.
France said that on Saturday it will begin screening passengers who arrive at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport on the once-daily flight from Guinea’s capital.
In the U.S., Customs and health officials at airports in Chicago, Atlanta, suburban Washington and Newark, New Jersey, were to begin taking the temperatures of passengers from the three hardest-hit West African countries Thursday. The screenings, using no-touch thermometers, started Saturday at New York’s Kennedy International Airport.
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With hospitals and airports on heightened alert, Frieden said the CDC is receiving hundreds of requests for help in ruling out Ebola in travellers. So far 12 cases merited testing, he said.
Frieden said investigators are trying to figure out how the nurses caught the virus from Duncan. In the meantime, he said, their cases show a need to strengthen the infection-control procedures that “allowed for exposure to the virus.”
Duncan’s death and the sick health care workers in the U.S. and Spain “intensify our concern about the global health threat,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
He said two Ebola vaccine candidates were undergoing a first phase of human clinical testing this fall. But he cautioned that scientists were still in the early stages of seeking new treatments or a vaccine.
A nurse at the Dallas hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian, on Thursday described a “chaotic scene” when the hospital faced Duncan, its first Ebola patient.
Briana Aguirre, who has helped treat the first nurse who was infected, told NBC’s “Today” show she felt exposed in the protective gear the hospital provided.
The hospital said it used the protective gear recommended by the CDC and updated the equipment as CDC guidelines changed. Because nurses complained that their necks were exposed, the hospital ordered hoods for them, according to a statement from Texas Health Presbyterian.
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