Dr Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Sunday the American doctor who contracted Ebola in West Africa seemed to have improved.
Dr Frieden, who was making media appearances in an effort to reassure a public worried by press reports and speculation over the West African outbreak, the worst ever, told NBC’s Meet the Press talk show it was encouraging to see Dr Kent Brantly walk out of an ambulance unassistedwhen he arrived at Atlanta’s Emory University hospital from Liberia on Saturday.
“Ebola can be deadly,” he said, “but for people who are healthy like this doctor, the fatality rate may be lower than those usually quoted.”
Asked if enough precautions had been taken, and if Brantly’s return represented an unacceptable risk to the US, Frieden said: “He was coming home, and the organisation that sent him to Africa made the decision to bring him home.
“He’s an American citizen, and what our role is in public health is to make sure that if an American is coming home with an infectious disease we protect so it doesn’t spread. That was what we did in transit and at the hospital.”
Brantly, from Texas, is the first of two US aid workers to be flown back to the country; Nancy Writebol, a missionary from South Carolina who worked for the same charity in Liberia, Samaritan’s Purse, is due to follow on the same specially adapted private jet, Guardian informs.
