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Scientists and politicians clashed over the US response to Ebola on Sunday, as all-clears given to Texas healthcare workers and a cruise ship passenger potentially exposed to the disease failed to quell continued public unease.
One man has died from Ebola in the US; two nurses who treated him at a Texas hospital have contracted the disease.
More than 4,500 people are believed to have died in the three west African countries worst hit by the Ebola epidemic: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
On Sunday afternoon, the Department of Defense announced the formation of “a 30-person expeditionary medical support team” made up of 20 critical-care nurses, five doctors “trained in infectious disease” and five trainers in infectious disease protocols. The team will only operate, if needed, within the US.
With just two weeks to go until closely fought midterm elections, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz stepped up his criticism of White House policy against travel restrictions, calling for extra border guards and dismissing the administration’s argument that medical advice showed quarantines and travel bans would be counter-productive.
“The doctors making this argument are working for the administration and repeating their talking points,” said Cruz, a potential candidate for the presidency in 2016, in an interview on CNN. “The arguments they are giving don’t make sense.”
Cruz’s criticism was immediately rejected by one of the administration’s top scientific advisers, who stressed that revised public health protocols were more than sufficient to contain future transmission and designed to “shave off risk”.
“I have never had an experience where the president is telling me to tell him something he wants to hear,” said Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on CNN in response to the Texas senator.
“There is no such thing as zero risk but when you get into relative risk, the chances [of transmission in the general US public] if not zero, are so vanishingly low that there are lots of other things you should worry about.”
The Pentagon said its new medical support team, which will train at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, will only be deployed to provide “short-notice assistance to civilian medical professionals”.
Officials do acknowledge that there is a tension between demonstrating such “abundance of caution” needed to reassure the public over Ebola and causing more anxiety by overreacting. This was demonstrated vividly on Sunday as a cruise ship at the centre of a high-profile Ebola scare returned to port in Galveston, Texas, having been prevented from docking in Mexico and Belize, only to have all tests for the disease on board prove negative.
A lab worker from the Dallas hospital who may have handled specimens collected from the first person to be given a diagnosis of Ebola in the US, Thomas Eric Duncan, went into voluntary quarantine in her cabin along with her husband last Wednesday after the cruise operator was told by federal authorities that she was on board and tighter travel protocols were being introduced.
The woman had already been self-monitoring, taking her temperature daily for fever signs, but isolated herself and stepped up her health checks after concern grew last week that the hospital’s procedures had been inadequate and news broke that the second nurse to test positive for the virus had taken a commercial flight the day before developing a high fever.
The cruise ship incident underlines how more stringent responses now in place come with an added risk of generating fear: some offices and facilities, such as a Pentagon car park, have been closed down for something as limited as a recent traveller to west Africa vomiting in public.
Fauci questioned whether the response to the cruise ship incident was medically necessary, but argued that such caution in evidence in recent days was important for reassuring the US public.
“You can understand why it was done,” he said. “Fear is something that needs to be respected.”
Nevertheless, the end of a 21-day incubation time limit on Sunday for some of the healthcare workers exposed to Duncan when he first attended a hospital in Dallas provided increased hope that transmission to other nurses and medical staff will be limited.
This in turn appears to be leading to a calmer message from the administration, with President Obama warning of the risks of hysteria on Saturday and Dr Fauci – a seasoned public health expert and veteran of the Aids epidemic – leading a robust response across five Sunday morning political talkshows.
Recently, the administration’s response has been split among a number of experts, such as Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Friday, Obama appointed political adviser Ron Klain as a single government coordinator, or “Ebola czar”.
Nevertheless, Republican critics argue the White House remains overly focused on message and say the administration, not them, is playing politics with Ebola.
“We should be less concerned about giving the public the feeling that the government is on top of this and more concerned about making sure that the government is on top of this,” said Cruz.
