Obama: U.S. Will Beef Up Airport Screenings for Ebola

UPDATED  With additional information  (Scroll below).

TIME

By Zeke J. Miller                              Oct. 6. 2014                5:24 PM

President Barack Obama said Monday that the U.S. is working on additional passenger screenings for airline passengers flying from Ebola-stricken West Africa, two weeks after a Liberian man infected with the disease entered the country.

Officials are “going to be working on protocols to do additional passenger screenings both at the source and here in the United States,” Obama said, addressing reporters following a briefing on his administration’s response to the epidemic in Africa and efforts to keep the disease from spreading to the U.S. “All of these things make me confident that here in the United States at least the chances of an outbreak, of an epidemic here are extraordinarily low.”

The president did not give specifics on the new screening measures, and Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declined to elaborate further in an interview with CNN after the meeting.

President Barack Obama meets with members of his national security team and senior staff to receive an update on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Oct. 6, 2014, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin—AP

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http://time.com/3476212/obama-ebola-screenings-passenger/

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REUTERS                                    Oct. 6, 2014               5:57 PM

 ... the White House said that a ban on travel from West African countries, which some U.S. officials have called for, would slow the fight against Ebola.

 White House spokesman Josh Earnest said officials did not want to impede transport systems used to send supplies andpersonnel to the hardest-hit countries in West Africa, so a travel ban was not being considered.

Airlines for America, a Washington-based trade group, separately said it was meeting with health and safety officials  to discuss whether additional screening procedures anywhere in the world might help improve on those already in place.

Link to full story

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/06/health-ebola-usa-idUSL2N0S10KW20141006