Area Airports On Alert To Look For Passengers With Ebola Symptoms
Newyork.cbslocal.com
August 1, 2014
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – Newark Liberty and John F. Kennedy airports are among 20 locations at points of entry in the U.S. with quarantine stations that have been staffed with health officials trained to look for symptoms of Ebola.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it will evaluate any travelers with signs of dangerous infectious diseases and isolate them when necessary.
The move comes after U.S. health officials on Thursday warned Americans not to travel to the three West African countries hit by an outbreak of the disease.
The travel advisory applies to nonessential travel to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the Ebola has killed more than 700 people this year.
“The bottom line is Ebola is worsening in West Africa,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, who announced the travel warning. He called Ebola “a tragic, dreadful and merciless virus.”
The purpose of the travel warning is to not only protect U.S. travelers, but limit their use of overburdened clinics and hospitals for injuries or other illnesses, he said.
For more than a month, CDC has advised travelers to simply take precautions when in the outbreak region. Thursday’s alert is the highest-level. The World Health Organization, however, has not issued a similar travel warning for the West Africa region. The last time the CDC issued a high-level warning was in 2003 because of a SARS outbreak in Asia.
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