While Americans fear an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus at home as the epidemic has killed over 3,400 people in West Africa, one news crew's experience at the Atlanta airport indicates that those fears may be well founded.
When CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and her crew returned from Liberia and she told passport officials at Atlanta's busy Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that she had been in West Africa covering the Ebola outbreak, nothing happened!
This is despite assurances from the Obama Administration and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that the U.S. is "working on protocols to do additional passenger screening both at the source and here in the United States,"
CBS reported.
"I expected that they were going to take my temperature, they were going to ask me a lot of questions, but they didn't," Cohen told CBS.
Instead, the customs official told her, "Wait a second. I got an email about passengers like you. Hold on a second." When he returned, he told her, "'You need to watch yourself for signs of Ebola.' And I said, 'Well, what am I watching out for?' And he couldn’t tell me."
She and her two colleagues, a photographer and a producer, were "shocked and pretty horrified at the lack of screening in U.S. airports," she told CBS.
To date, the White House has refused to impose a travel ban on travelers from West Africa to the U.S., despite calls for a ban from Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who requested a travel ban in July when the first cases broke out in West Africa.
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first case diagnosed in the U.S., arrived from Liberia on Sept. 20 and had eight days to infect others before finally being quarantined in a Texas hospital. The CDC is monitoring 48 of the people Duncan is known to have come into contact with, and so far, none have been found to be infected,
the Huffington Post reports.
Four years ago, the Obama Administration dumped recommendations from the CDC that would have allowed the federal government to quarantine airline passengers showing symptoms of contagious disease for three days, as well as all those exposed to those passengers, and required airlines to keep contact information on all passengers to ease CDC follow-ups.
Obama said, "I consider this a top national security priority. This is not just a matter of charity. It is also an issue with respect to the political stability and economic stability of this region."
Texas Republican Gov Rick Perry told NBC in Dallas, "Customs officials and Border Patrol agents at all points of entry should immediately be directed to conduct enhanced screening procedures" for Ebola.