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From hospital safety to travel bans, the facts you need to know
1. What went wrong at the CDC?
Everywhere he goes, Dr. Tom Frieden carries a stack of little white index cards. He uses them as a brain bank, a place to jot private thoughts in his tiny scrawl. As director of the Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC), Frieden is the public face of the U.S. response to ebola. And given the nationwide panic about the virus, it’s no surprise that one of the 4-by-6 cards is labeled “errors.”
The card is filling up fast. Frieden declared that U.S. hospitals were ready for ebola, but the first hospital tested flunked badly. The CDC was forced to tighten protection guidelines for health care workers after two Dallas nurses contracted the…