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Obama Touts Heroism Of Ebola Health Care Workers

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WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Wednesday touted the heroism of health care workers fighting Ebola abroad, further emphasizing the disagreement between himself and other politicians who want the workers quarantined when they come home.

"All of them have signed up to leave their homes and their loved ones and head straight into the heart of the Ebola epidemic," Obama said during a White House event honoring American doctors and nurses returning from West Africa, where the Ebola virus has killed nearly 5,000 people.

"We need to call them what they are, which is American heroes," he said, surrounded by doctors and nurses in the White House East Room. "They deserve our gratitude and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."

Some of the health care workers who shared the podium with Obama were within the 21-day monitoring period recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for people potentially exposed to Ebola, a White House official told The Huffington Post. The official added that the workers have followed CDC guidance and that none were symptomatic.

Obama, who has repeatedly sought to show he is unafraid of catching the virus from health workers officials have said shouldn't be contagious, shook hands with each of the workers after his speech.

Experts say Ebola is only transmissible through bodily fluids and that people aren't contagious unless they're showing symptoms, which include fever and vomiting. Nevertheless, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and other governors around the country have called for a quarantine on anyone returning from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, the three countries where the virus is raging. Obama and public health experts have said that travel restrictions could prevent aid workers from going to the Ebola-stricken countries to help. The president of the World Bank has said the region needs at least 5,000 more such workers.

Per Christie's quarantine order, New Jersey on Friday confined nurse Kaci Hickox, who had just returned from a Doctors Without Borders mission in Sierra Leone, to a hospital tent for three days. Hickox was released after she threatened to sue, and both New Jersey and New York announced that other returning health care workers would be allowed to serve out their quarantines in their own homes.

On Tuesday, Christie said New Jersey's policy hadn't changed, even though the state had released Hickox. Obama, for his part, said on Wednesday in a thinly veiled reference to the quarantines, "If we're discouraging our health care workers who are prepared to make these sacrifices from traveling to these places in need, then we're not doing our job in terms of looking after our own health and safety."

Yet not all parts of the federal government are entirely on board with the president's message. The U.S. Army on Monday instituted a three-week quarantine for soldiers working in West Africa -- even though they haven't been interacting with Ebola victims. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the entire Defense Department would quarantine all troops returning from Ebola missions.

Obama defended the discrepancy Tuesday by saying people in the military live in a stricter environment to begin with, suggesting that defense personnel wouldn't mind quarantine as much as health care workers would.

"They are already, by definition, if they're in the military, under more circumscribed conditions," Obama said.

It has been two weeks since the last confirmed instance of anyone catching Ebola in America. The two nurses who were infected after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who contracted the virus after traveling to Texas last month, have both made full recoveries. Obama hugged one of the nurses, Nina Pham, at the White House last week.

"Let's give a hug for the cameras," Obama said at the time, according to a pool report.

This story has been updated to include comments from a White House official.

Also on HuffPost:

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Ebola virus myth-busting
of
  • Ebola is highly infectious and even being in the same room as someone with the disease can put you at risk

    Not as far as we know. Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms begin, and it spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients. It is not, from what we know of the science so far, an airborne virus. So contact with the patient's sweat, blood, vomit, feces or semen could cause infection, and the body remains infectious after death. Much of the spread in west Africa has been attributed to the initial distrust of medical staff, leaving many to be treated at home by loved ones, poorly equipped medics catching the disease from patients, and the traditional burial rites involving manually washing of the dead body. From what we know already, you can't catch it from the air, you can't catch it from food, you can't catch it from water.

  • You need to be worried if someone is sneezing or coughing hard

    Apart from the fact that sneezing and coughing aren't generally thought to be symptoms of Ebola, the disease is not airborne, so unless someone coughed their phlegm directly into your mouth, you wouldn't catch the disease. Though medical staff will take every precaution to avoid coming into contact with the body of an infected person at all costs, with stringent hygiene there should be a way to contain the virus if it reaches the UK.

  • Cancelling all flights from west Africa would stop the spread of Ebola

    This actually has pretty serious implications. British Airways suspended its four-times-weekly flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone until the end of March, the only direct flight to the region from the UK. In practice, anyone can just change planes somewhere else and get to Britain from Europe, north Africa, or the Middle East. And aid agencies say that flight cancellations are hampering efforts to get the disease under control, they rely on commercial flights to get to the infected regions. Liberia's information minister, Lewis Brown, told the Telegraph this week that BA was putting more people in danger. "We need as many airlines coming in to this region as possible, because the cost of bringing in supplies and aid workers is becoming prohibitive," he told the Telegraph. "There just aren't enough seats on the planes. I can understand BA's initial reaction back in August, but they must remember this is a global fight now, not just a west African one, and we can't just be shut out." Christopher Stokes, director of MSF in Brussels, agreed: “Airlines have shut down many flights and the unintended consequence has been to slow and hamper the relief effort, paradoxically increasing the risk of this epidemic spreading across countries in west Africa first, then potentially elsewhere. We have to stop Ebola at source and this means we have to be able to go there.”

  • Temperature screening at airports is an effective way to stop those who have the disease from travelling

    The screening process is pretty porous, especially when individuals want to subvert it. Wake up on the morning of your flight, feel a bit hot, and you definitely don't want to be sent to an isolation booth for days and have to miss your flight. Take an ibuprofen and you can lower your temperature enough to get past the scanners. And if you suspect you have Ebola, you might be desperate to leave, seeing how much better the treatment success has been in western nations. And experts have warned that you cannot expect people to be honest about who they have had contact with. Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola victim who died in Texas, told officials he had not been in contact with anyone with the disease, but had in fact visited someone in the late stages of the virus, though he said he believed it was malaria. The extra screening that the US implemented since his death probably wouldn't have singled out Duncan when he arrived from hard-hit Liberia last month, because he had no symptoms while travelling.

  • Border staff should stop people coming in to the country who are at risk

    They're not doctors, and it's a monumental task to train 23,500 people who work for the UK Border Agency how to correctly diagnose a complex disease, and spot it in the millions of people who come through British transport hubs. Public Health England has provided UK Border Force with advice on the assessment of an unwell patient on entry to UK, but they can't be expected to check everyone.

  • Screening at British airports should be implemented to stop unwell people coming in from affected areas

    As mentioned before, the UK, especially London, is a major transport hub. Unlike the US, most of those coming from west Africa will have crossed through Europe, so infected people could be coming from practically anywhere, not just flights directly from those countries. This would require the UK to screen every returning traveller, as people could return to the UK from an affected country through any port of entry. This would be huge numbers of low risk people, at vast, vast expense.

  • Ebola doesn't have a cure

    There are several cures currently being tested for Ebola. They include the ZMapp vaccine which was administered to British sufferer William Pooley and two other Americans who caught the disease in west Africa and they all recovered. Supplies of the drug have now run dry, and it has not been through clinical trials to prove its effectiveness. Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the company that makes ZMapp, says the drug's supplies are exhausted and that it takes months to make even a small batch. But an Ebola cure is very much on the horizon, and would have come sooner had it been seen as any kind of priority for drug companies before it started reaching the western world.

  • Ebola is a death sentence

    It is true that certain strains of Ebola have had a death rate of 90%. However, with this particular epidemic the stats are more positive, a death rate of around 60%. Those who have decent, strong immune systems, are able to access intravenous fluids and scrupulous health care are far more likely to survive, which is why the survival rate of westerners who contract the disease is far better. Experts have suggested that, rather than waste money on pointless airport screenings, funds could be used to improve infrastructure in the affected nations to help halt the spread of the disease at source.

  • Ebola turns you into a zombie

    Just, no.

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