The
$6.2 million that President Barack Obama has proposed to stop the spread of the Ebola virus is an "an outrage," says health policy expert and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey.
"$6.2 billion is three times the entire GDP of Liberia," McCaughey told Ed Berliner on "MidPoint" on
Newsmax TV Thursday.
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"It is more than we spend on cancer research, it is more than six times what the president is willing to spend combatting hospital infections here in the U.S. that kill 75,000 Americans in hospitals every year," she explained.
"The fact is we don't have to get hit with any outbreak at all if the president did what every epidemiologist would recommend aside from politics and that is, suspend the visas and isolate healthcare workers who return to the United States," she said.
"There is no reason for us to be threatened, and both [WHO director] Margaret Chan and the White House want this danger, want us to feel this danger so that we will send that money to Africa," she contends.
There are 357 individuals in New York who are being monitored, most of those are people who have traveled from West Africa in recent weeks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants these people to be
monitored for three weeks after their arrival to the United States. They are advised to report their temperatures twice a day.
According to McCaughey, "monitoring for fever is insufficient to identify who might be infected with Ebola."
"A series of new pieces of research, very important research published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that somewhere between 13 to 17 percent of people who have Ebola don't develop a fever until they're very far along in the disease," she explained.
She says that fevers often don't turn up until someone is already being hospitalized with "other signs of the disease and clearly infectious . . . be aware that that is insufficient."
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