CDC Chief: Ebola's Spread to the United States 'Inevitable'

CDC Chief: Ebola's Spread to the United States 'Inevitable'

Thursday at the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health hearing titled, “Combating the Ebola Threat,” the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden said “We are all connected and inevitably there will be travelers, American citizens” who will travel in the infected African countries and come “here with symptoms.”

He added, “It is certainly possible that we could have ill people in the US who develop Ebola after having been exposed elsewhere.”

The Associated Press reported “one man with dual US-Liberian citizenship has died from Ebola, after becoming sick on a plane from Monrovia to Lagos and exposing as many as seven other people in Nigeria.”

Today the CDC, announced it has moved to a “level 1” alert to combat the Ebola outbreak in the African countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Liberia. According to the World Health Organization the virus has killed 932 people since March.

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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