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Health

Ebola outbreak: ‘even worse than feared'

Health Desk |
Update: 2014-08-27 23:40:00
Ebola outbreak: ‘even worse than feared'

DHAKA: "It's even worse than I'd feared," Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday of the Ebola outbreak rampaging through West Africa. "Every day this outbreak goes on, it increases the risk for another export to another country.

"The sooner the world comes together to help Liberia and West Africans, the safer we will all be."

Frieden spoke to CNN's Nima Elbagir in Monrovia, Liberia, where fear and anger over the largest Ebola outbreak on record has grown as health officials put up quarantines around some of the capital city's poorest areas.

More than 2,600 people have been infected by Ebola in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria since the outbreak began in December, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 1,500 have died.

A CDC staff member was recently flown home to the United States on a private charter after spending time in close proximity with another health care worker who tested positive for Ebola in Sierra Leone.

The CDC worker is reportedly healthy and has shown no symptoms of the deadly virus. He or she is simply rotating back to the United States as previously scheduled, according to the CDC. It is CDC policy that people who have been exposed to Ebola and are traveling long distances do so on a private plane in the three weeks after exposure to lower the risk of spreading the infection, reports CNN.

"We think it's the right thing to do, to bring them home," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said. "They want to come home. Their tour of duty was up, and we've made it crystal clear that if they go over there and have something like this happen and want to go home, we're going to bring them home."

The staff member will be monitored for 21 days -- the longest known incubation period -- for Ebola symptoms, but he or she currently "poses no Ebola-related risk to friends, family, co-workers, or the public," the CDC said in a statement.

BDST: 0940 HRS, AUG 28, 2014

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