House Republicans press for travel ban from West Africa as US officials defend response

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WASHINGTON – House Republicans demanded a travel ban from Ebola-ravaged West Africa Thursday, calling it the only sure way to protect Americans from the virus’s deadly reach. Administration officials resisted, as anxiety over the disease raced through the country and rattled the White House and Congress.

At a tense congressional hearing, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered assurances that Americans are safe and there will be no widespread Ebola outbreak here. A day after a second nurse was found to test positive after treating a patient in Dallas who later died, Dr. Thomas Frieden defended the government’s response, even while acknowledging that protocols evolved as the nurses fell ill.

“There’s zero doubt in my mind that barring a mutation which changes it —which we don’t think is likely — there will not be a large outbreak in the U.S.,” Frieden told members of the Energy and Commerce Committee who’d returned from the campaign trail for a specially convened hearing less than a month from Election Day. “We know how to control Ebola, even in this period.”

It wasn’t enough to quiet lawmakers’ concerns as they reported growing fears from their constituents in the wake of news that one of the nurses had been cleared by the CDC to travel on a commercial plane even after registering a slightly elevated fever. A small handful of schools were closed in the states of Ohio and Texas amid fears that students or staff may have had contact with her.

“People are scared,” said Rep. Fred Upton, the panel’s Republican chairman. “People’s lives are at stake, and the response so far has been unacceptable.”

Upton and other Republicans said the administration should ban travel from the hardest hit nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and quarantine U.S. citizens arriving from there.

“You’re right, it needs to be solved in Africa. But until it is, we should not be allowing these folks in, period,” Upton told Frieden.

Frieden said that 100 to 150 people daily arrive from “hot zones” into the U.S. The CDC has implemented enhanced screening at the five U.S. airports where over 94 per cent of those travellers arrive.

At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest a travel ban was not under consideration, and he suggested it could actually make things worse by giving people an incentive to “go underground,” evade screening and conceal their travel history.

“And that means it would be much harder for us to keep tabs on these individuals and make sure that they get the screening that’s needed,” he said.

Rep. Cory Gardner, a Republican mocked that reasoning. “That’s like saying all children with chicken pox should stay in school so we know where they are,” he told reporters after the hearing.

Despite the administration’s reluctance, “Travel restrictions are coming,” predicted Rep. Billy Long, a Republican.

Frieden left the door open, saying the administration would consider any options to better protect Americans. President Barack Obama cancelled his own travel plans for the second day in the row to stay in Washington.

A leader of the Texas hospital system apologized to lawmakers for failures, including the initial misdiagnosis of Thomas Eric Duncan even after he reported travelling from Liberia. Duncan later died.

And Frieden raised alarms of his own about the risk to this country if the raging epidemic in West Africa, which has already claimed more than 4,000 lives, spreads even more. “If this were to happen it could become a threat to our health system and the health care we give for a long time to come,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Lauran Neergaard, Josh Lederman and Connie Cass contributed to this report.

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