WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Tuesday said the Ebola epidemic can be halted if the US doesn’t give in to fear and adopts “sensible” monitoring requirements for health-care workers, whom he said were “doing God’s work” in West Africa, where the virus is raging.
“This disease can be contained. It will be defeated,” Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House, after a call with members of a US Agency for International Development team that’s been working in West Africa since early August.
But, he cautioned, the US “has to keep leading the global response. America cannot look like it is shying away.” Obama also spoke on Tuesday with Amber Vinson, one of two Dallas nurses who contracted Ebola from a patient who caught it in West Africa, and he said it was important to note that two people got Ebola on American soil, and that both were now free of the disease.
The only American still being treated for Ebola is Craig Spencer, a New York physician who contracted the disease in Guinea.
Earlier on Tuesday Vinson hugged each member of her medical team at Emory University Hospital before being discharged from the facility.
“After a rigorous course of treatment and thorough testing, we have determined that Miss Vinson has recovered from her infection with Ebola virus and that she can return to her family, to the community and to her life without any concerns about transmitting this virus to any other individuals,” Dr. Bruce Ribner, the medical director of Emory’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit, said at a news conference.
Vinson had been in isolation since October 15.
Vinson is the seventh patient in the epidemic to recover from Ebola after treatment in one of the nation’s four biocontainment units.
Obama’s remarks in Washington came a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines for US doctors, nurses and other health-care workers returning to the US.
The administration had pressured the governments of New York state and New Jersey to loosen what it saw as overly restrictive quarantine restrictions imposed late last week after the New York doctor was hospitalized with Ebola.
Obama didn’t mention either state in his remarks, but he called the new CDC guidelines “sensible, based in science and tailored to the unique circumstances of each health worker.” The White House on Monday criticized New Jersey’s mandatory quarantine of a health-care worker returning from Sierra Leone, and Obama said monitoring requirements needed to be prudent but not deter health-care workers.
“We’ve got to make sure that those workers who are willing and able and dedicated to go over there in a really tough job, that they’re applauded, thanked and supported,” he said. “I want to make sure that every policy we put in place is supportive of their efforts, because if they are successful, then we’re not going to have to worry about Ebola here at home.”
Obama said he planned to meet on Wednesday at the White House with doctors and public-health workers who returned from West Africa and who were about to go.
The president said the US Agency for International Development team had helped to increase the number of Ebola treatment units and burial teams, expanded the pipeline of medical personnel, equipment and supplies, and launched an education campaign.
Image credits: AP/David Goldman