ATLANTA — The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that an infusion of cash Congress is considering this week is critical to preventing the spread of Ebola from swamping this country.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Georgia-based CDC, said that added funding will pay for overseas laboratories, emergency-response centers, training of physicians in other countries to become “disease detectives,” and what he called early-warning systems for infections.
The $43 million boost for the CDC in the temporary funding bill has a significant focus in overseas disease control.
“We are only as safe as the weakest link,” Frieden said, noting that inadequate public health in poor countries can lead to the spreading of infections that can travel to this country.
“That risk will not be minimized for us until it is minimized for other countries,” he said.
Screening of 80,000 airline passengers traveling from West Africa has turned up just 80 people who were not allowed to board their fights to this country.
He gave his remarks during a luncheon at the Atlanta Press Club a day after the U.S. House of Representatives unveiled the stopgap spending bill that must pass the Senate before Friday’s adjournment. It was also a day after Time magazine named the Ebola fighters its anonymous “Man of the Year.”
Frieden said it’s appropriate that the magazine’s cover not show the face of any individual because the work involves a huge team. The CDC has more than 700 of its staff working on the Ebola outbreak, with 180 currently in the field. That’s in conjunction with workers from other nations as well as nongovernmental organizations.
“We have many months to go. We don’t know with certainty that we can get it back in the box. We don’t know with certainty that we can make Ebola go away. But we do know with certainty that we’re going to do everything in our power to make that happen.”
His speech also fell on the day after the CDC and the Association of State & Territorial Health Officials released a report pegging Georgia’s public health efforts as below the national average. Georgia earned a score of 6.6 when the national average is 7.4. The state was significantly below average on dealing with children, mental health and environmental monitoring, which received a 2.9 score out of a possible 10.
Frieden said Georgia has been a good home for the CDC, the largest federal agency not headquartered in Washington. The state’s universities and nongovernmental organizations like CARE are good allies, he said.
In addressing the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, he said it had been arrested in Nigeria, partly by tapping healthcare professionals already involved with Rotary International’s efforts to eradicate polio in that country. But in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the job is not over, and Ebola is crippling their social and economic structure he said, creating a large task for the CDC.
“The only way to get zero cases in the United States is to have zero cases in West Africa,” he said.
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