Health Officials Promise Extra Airport Screening for Ebola --- Faced with growing concern over the spread of the Ebola virus, public health officials on Tuesday promised extra measures to screen airline passengers arriving into the United States. But they remained opposed to more draconian travel restrictions that they say would cause more problems than they would solve. -- Among the measures under consideration by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, temperatures of at-risk passengers would be checked, or they might be subject to detailed questioning upon their arrival in the United States. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the agency’s director, provided no specific details, a reminder of how easily the disease can travel and how difficult it is to detect. -- So far, only one case of Ebola has been diagnosed in the United States, but pressure is coming from some members of Congress and from elsewhere for the administration to adopt a more forceful posture. -- Dr. Frieden said new measures would be announced in coming days but cautioned against measures that could backfire or prove ineffective in the long run. -- “We recognize that whatever we do, until the disease is controlled in Africa, we can’t get the risk to zero here,” Dr. Frieden said. “We may be able to reduce it and we’ll look at every opportunity to do that.” -- He added: “In medicine, one of our cardinal rules is above all do no harm. If we do something that impedes our ability to stop the outbreak in West Africa, it could spread further there, we could have more countries like Liberia, and the challenge would be much greater and go on for a longer time.” --- The last time that health officials tried to screen passengers, they met with mixed results, Dr. Bloom said. Confronted with the SARS epidemic in 2003, some countries sought to screen passengers, but in the experience of Australia, Canada and Singapore, these screenings failed to turn up a single SARS case. -- At least 14 Ebola cases have been treated outside West Africa in the current outbreak. Most of those involve health and aid workers who contracted the disease in West Africa and were flown back to their home countries for medical treatment. -- The virus has started to raise concerns among those who work on airlines. On Tuesday, union representatives of flight attendants and airport ground workers called for tougher screening. In addition, the United States Coast Guard says it is planning to increase screening procedures for passengers aboard cargo ships coming into American ports from West Africa. -- Two people outside West Africa have been found to have the virus. One is a Liberian man who began showing symptoms four days after arriving in Dallas and the other a Spanish nurse who became ill after treating a missionary in a hospital in Madrid. -- But screening passengers at their point of departure has flaws since it relies on them to tell the truth. In the one known Ebola case in the United States, the man infected with the virus had lied about not having any contact with an Ebola patient, the authorities said. -- European countries face the same dilemma. The health authorities in Spain have quarantined three people and are monitoring dozens of others who came into contact with the nurse, the first known case of the disease in Europe. In Britain, the health authorities have said there is a real risk that the virus will be imported but have acknowledged that they have no plan to screen visitors entering the country for Ebola. -- More than 7,400 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola since March, according to the World Health Organization, making this the biggest outbreak on record. More than 3,400 have died so far. -- While public officials try to contain the outbreak, they also must deal with a public confidence crisis. Increasing controls at the border may not be entirely effective in preventing Ebola from spreading, but it might calm public fears about the disease. -- “Putting another screening filter on our soil makes a certain amount of sense in building public confidence — and public fear and confidence is the major driver of this,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Still, he added: “There is no foolproof solution. They are not going to eliminate the risk.” -- Mr. Morrison said the administration could tighten visa requirements from some countries, something that has not been addressed publicly yet. -- “We have to assume that in the next several months there will be a mushrooming of cases and that will increase pressure on Europe and the United States since the exportation of cases will be linked to the mushrooming of the epidemic itself,” Mr. Morrison said. “We are only at the front end of dealing with this.” - Read More, JAD MOUAWAD, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/world/africa/health-officials-promise-extra-airport-screening-.html?ref=world&_r=0