Hundreds of public health professionals working 24/7 in support
\nFor Immediate Release: Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Contact: Media Relations
(404) 639-3286
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has more than 50 disease detectives and other highly trained experts battling Ebola on the ground in West Africa \u2013 successfully deploying in less than two weeks the surge of help it promised within 30 days.
\nCDC\u2019s Emergency Operations Center is also at its highest level of alert. This means more than 350 CDC U.S. staff are working on logistics, communications, analytics, management, and other support functions to support the response 24/7.
\n\u201cWe are fulfilling our promise to the people of West Africa, Americans, and the world, that CDC would quickly ramp up its efforts to help bring the worst Ebola outbreak in history under control,\u201d said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. \u201cWe know how to stop Ebola. It won\u2019t be easy or fast, but working together with our U.S. and international partners and country leadership, together we are doing it.\u201d
\nCDC currently has 55 people deployed to West Africa to fight Ebola\u2019s spread: 14 in Guinea, 18 in Liberia, 16 in Sierra Leone, and seven in Nigeria. While the number of CDC experts may change slightly from day to day, given staff rotations, more than 60 CDC personnel are expected to remain in these four countries continuously.
\n\u201cCDC\u2019s public health experts in West Africa are working closely with our U.S. Government and international partners as part of this worldwide emergency response to the Ebola outbreak,\u201d said Inger Damon, M.D., Ph.D., incident manager for the CDC Ebola response. \u201cOur primary goal is to bring to an end the suffering of so many as well as develop the public health infrastructure there to help prevent future outbreaks.\u201d
\nThe focus of the CDC effort is on stopping the outbreak. This means finding every person who is sick with Ebola and tracing their contacts. This \u201ccontact tracing\u201d involves finding everyone who may have been exposed to a person with Ebola and checking for signs of illness every day for 21 days. Ebola virus can remain in the body for weeks before making a person sick. If any of the people who were in contact with a person sick with Ebola develops a fever or other Ebola symptoms, that person is isolated and treated and the cycle starts again \u2014 and all of that person\u2019s contacts must be traced and followed for 21 days.
\nThis response in Africa involves many healthcare personnel and community health workers. While in West Africa, CDC experts train and coordinate these workers, collect the outbreak information they gather, and analyze these data to make the best use of available resources to break the chain of Ebola transmission. CDC laboratory technicians are helping to set up labs and train lab workers to conduct Ebola testing. Other CDC staff work to educate people living in these countries on how to avoid Ebola infection and on the value of seeking help early if they develop symptoms of disease that could be Ebola. Still other CDC public health professionals work with airport and border personnel in the West African countries to keep sick people in Ebola-affected areas from traveling.
\nCDC\u2019s Ebola efforts include preparing the U.S.
CDC\u2019s Ebola effort is not all overseas. A disease threat anywhere in the world is a threat everywhere in the world, and CDC is preparing for any possibility, including that a traveler might become ill with Ebola while in the United States. Although Ebola poses very little or no risk to the U.S. community at large, CDC and healthcare providers in the United States need to be prepared. Therefore, CDC has been:
Currently, CDC and the Department of Defense have the only U.S. laboratories capable of conducting diagnostic testing to confirm that a patient has Ebola and not some other illness. That is about to change. Additional labs across the United States \u2013 part of the Laboratory Response Network (LRN) established by CDC \u2013 will soon have the technology to conduct Ebola diagnostic testing on acute-phase specimens. These labs have received detailed guidance on the inactivation and safe handling of samples potentially carrying Ebola virus. Once they demonstrate that they can accurately detect or rule out Ebola in a sample, these labs will be capable of rapidly providing presumptive diagnosis for ill people suspected of having Ebola. These rapid presumptive results will then be definitively confirmed by laboratories at CDC.
\nCDC is confident that U.S. hospitals are capable of safely managing a patient with Ebola when carefully following CDC\u2019s infection control recommendations and isolating that patient in his or her own room?.
\n\u201cOur health care professionals can safely manage an Ebola patient,\u201d says CDC infection control expert David Kuhar, M.D. \u201cWhat we recommend to prevent transmission of Ebola in hospital settings is similar to what we recommend for other infectious diseases spread by direct contact and possibly droplets.\u201d
\nClick here for photos and b-roll of a CDC expert getting ready to deploy, and other Ebola audiovisual resources.
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