Members of the Texas congressional delegation urged the federal government Friday to add Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to the list of airports with heightened Ebola screening.
They made the request during a hearing at D/FW convened by the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Federal authorities have designated five international airports for stepped-up screening of travelers: John F. Kennedy in New York City; Newark Liberty in New Jersey; O’Hare in Chicago; Dulles outside Washington, D.C.; and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.
According to the White House, those airports account for 94 percent of the travelers coming from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, West African countries where Ebola is epidemic.
That would include Thomas Eric Duncan, the 42-year-old Liberian who died of Ebola this week in Dallas. Duncan flew from Liberia to Brussels on Sept. 19, then from Brussels to Dulles, then from Dulles to D/FW.
Still, the Texas congressional representatives who attended Friday’s hearing urged that D/FW, along with Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport, be added to the list. They were Republicans Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, Blake Farenthold, Kenny Marchant and Michael McCaul; and Democrats Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Johnson.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, supported their request in a a letter.
“Most people in the U.S. know that if you are going anywhere in the country, you are probably going to have to go through D/FW Airport,” said Marchant, whose district includes the airport.
“I think this is a key place where we need to have an active point of screening going on.”
Marchant and other Republicans went further, saying the United States should consider banning commercial passengers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Public health experts at the hearing said that wouldn’t be helpful. Indeed, they said, it could place Americans at greater risk.
The best way to protect the country from Ebola is to halt its spread in Africa, they said. And that requires health workers from the United States to travel to and from West Africa.
“We feel that [blocking travel] would cause the disease to grow in that area and spill over to other countries and then spill over to the U.S.,” said Dr. Toby Merlin, director of the division of preparedness and emerging infections at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Barton, whose district includes parts of Fort Worth and Arlington, was unconvinced. He said the government seems to be basing its decisions on civil rights and diplomacy, not public health.
“You are almost guaranteeing mathematically to miss some people [through screening],” he told Merlin. “With due respect, I don’t accept that answer that we can’t stop flights simply because we need to get in.”
The hearing was called to examine the federal and local response to the Ebola case in Dallas. The criticisms were all aimed at the federal level; local and state leaders were praised.
Representatives complimented Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins for treating Duncan’s family with “grace and humanity.”
They lauded state leaders for their monitoring of people who came into contact with Duncan.
Friday was Day 12 of three weeks of tracking 48 people considered to be at risk. None has shown any symptoms of Ebola.
Republicans at the hearing expressed dismay that President Barack Obama doesn’t employ a special assistant who focuses on biodefense. The job existed under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, they said, but was eliminated by Obama in 2009.
Democrats decried the budget cuts that have been imposed on public health agencies.
Medical experts agreed that there’s little risk of an Ebola epidemic in the United States. But the federal government and state health departments need money to track other viruses, such as the flu, they said.
“The danger is that we will be fixated on this virus instead of other viruses that have outbreak potential,” said Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas School of Public Health.
Follow Matthew Watkins on Twitter at @mwatkinsDMN.
