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CDC To Monitor All Travelers Coming To U.S. From Ebola-Stricken Countries

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WASHINGTON -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Wednesday that it will implement a tougher, new 21-day monitoring period for travelers coming to America from the three West African states plagued by the Ebola epidemic.

The new system will be implemented starting Oct. 27, and will take place in six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia. CDC Director Tom Frieden said the plan is to expand the reach of the monitoring program to other states, and noted that the initial phase still will cover 70 percent of incoming travelers.

Under the monitoring program, the CDC and state health officials will be in daily contact with anyone entering the country from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, from their arrival in the country until the incubation period ends. Upon entering the country, travelers will be asked to turn over email addresses and telephone numbers (two of each) where they can be reached, as well as a home address, and the name, address and phone number of a friend or family member.

The travelers also will be required to report their temperatures once a day to state and local health officials. They will be required to report the presence and absence of Ebola-like symptoms, and will be required to coordinate with public health officials if they need or want to travel. Should the travelers not report back on their temperatures, Frieden said, the CDC and state health officials would deploy "a rapid planned follow up" to track them down.

“If the traveler doesn’t report in, the state or local public health official will take immediate steps to find the [person],” said Frieden.

On a conference call announcing the new system, two main concerns were raised about its feasibility. The first was its dependence on travelers self-reporting their condition, and the second was that it requires only one temperature reading a day. Frieden downplayed the significance of both, noting that the CDC was "recommending that temperatures be taken twice a day and be reported twice a day."

This was, he added, "the same protocol that we recommended and was used in Nigeria [where Ebola was eradicated] and elsewhere. It is up to the state health department how to make sure that [temperatures are read]. Direct observation of treatment ... is something that is used. There are a lot of aspects of feasibility and its visibility [with that]. But by all means we will support states in any way they want to do this effectively."

The legal authority to conduct the new monitoring program, he added, "resides in the state and local health departments where they can require participation in a program that is to prevent the potential spread of a communicable disease."

To help facilitate the daily monitoring, the CDC also will hand incoming travelers from those three countries a kit that includes a phone number for a person they can call 24/7 to report health concerns. It also will include a tracking log, thermometer, guidance on how to monitor one’s temperature, and a pamphlet explaining Ebola symptoms.

The CDC estimates that roughly 150 passengers a day from the three West African countries are flying through the five airports to which they now must travel in order to enter the United States. Every single one of those travelers will be subjected to the monitoring, including CDC officials returning from West Africa and journalists covering the crisis there.

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Ebola virus myth-busting
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  • 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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