Airport Screening 'Doesn't Really Pick Up Ebola'

Patch staff report

More than 30,000 people arriving in the United States from west Africa were screened for the deadly Ebola virus since October 2014 at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and four others — and not a single case was discovered.

“When Ebola struck in the United States, there was widespread — I would say irrational — fear and panic. This was a political compromise,” Lawrence Gostin, a director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights, told USA Today.

Screening, Gostin said, “doesn’t really pick up Ebola.”

Travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea landing at Chicago’s O’Hare, John F. Kennedy in New York, Newark, Washington Dulles and Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson have been screened since Oct. 11, 2014. The screenings began after a man in Dallas came down with Ebola after spending time in Liberia. The man was diagnosed on Sept. 30 and died on Oct. 8.

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Among those 30,000 people screened in the last year, one person infected with Ebola slipped through.

Reports USA Today:

Health experts said the arrival screening proved futile as a measure of protection for public health. At least one person, a New York City doctor who had treated Ebola patients and returned to the United States on Oct. 16, 2014, passed through screening without detection. He monitored his own condition, went to a hospital when he developed symptoms and tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 23. He recovered.

Screenings were dropped three weeks ago for travelers from Liberia after the WHO concluded the ebola epidemic there had ended.