US plans extra airport screening for Ebola

The US is planning to introduce additional screening methods at airports to fight the spread of Ebola.

Although it has dismissed calls for a complete travel ban from affected countries, it says new protocols are being developed both at source and in the US.

Passengers leaving affected countries already have their temperatures checked, but people do not become infectious until they start displaying symptoms.

US President Barack Obama said the likelihood of an Ebola outbreak in the US is ‘extremely low’, but he added: "We don’t have a lot of margin of error."

Obama unveiled the plans for extra screening nearly a week after a Liberian man became the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the US.

Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted the disease in Liberia, remains in a critical condition in a hospital in Dallas where he is receiving an experimental drug treatment.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that a Spanish nurse has became the first person known to have contracted the deadly Ebola virus outside west Africa.

Investigations are under way at a hospital in Madrid where the nurse had treated two Spanish missionaries who died of the disease after being flown home from the region.

So far, more than 3,400 people have died from the viral disease in West Africa.

There is growing pressure in the US to ban travel from affected countries, but government health officials say that would make it much more difficult to stop the spread of the deadly virus.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said any travel ban to West African countries would only make it much harder to stem the spread of the disease.

"If you isolate them, you can cause unrest in the country and it’s conceivable that governments could fall if you just isolate them completely," Fauci said.

Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted that a ban on incoming flights would impact Americans trying to fly home and cutting off countries could lead to the virus spreading elsewhere in Africa.

"We don’t want to do something that inadvertently increases our risk by making it harder to stop the outbreak there, because if it spreads more widely throughout different countries in Africa, that will be even more of a risk to us," Frieden said.

"There are many other people who have the right to enter into this country and we’re not going to be able to get to zero risk no matter what we do until we control the outbreak in West Africa," he added.

Many US lawmakers have taken an opposing view, urging the administration to halt all air travel to the region.

"The Obama administration keeps saying they won’t shut down flights and instead say we should listen to ‘the experts,’ and they said it would be counterproductive to stop these flights. That statement defies logic," argued Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.