Screening for Ebola begins at JFK airport

Originally published Saturday, October 11, 2014 at 6:52 PM

NEW YORK - Passengers arriving from the three countries hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began undergoing enhanced screening Saturday before being allowed through immigration at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, the first of five ports of entry to begin the additional scrutiny in the wake of the country's first death from Ebola.

Two of the first people to undergo the new measures, which include checking passengers for fever, were the teenage sons of Marie Nellon, who waited impatiently for her children to appear in the arrivals hall after their Brussels Airlines flight from Monrovia, Liberia.

'It's like a bomb you can't see coming,' Nellon said of the virus ravaging her homeland, where her sons live with their father. 'You have to take every precaution.'

More than 4,000 people have died since March in the current Ebola outbreak, most in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Nellon, who lives in the U.S., said she was bringing her sons, Johnson, 14, and Thomas, 17, to this country to get them away from the Ebola risk. She hopes they will be able to remain.

'Last night, I was so worried I could not sleep,' Nellon said as the board in the arrivals hall showed that the boys' flight had landed but had not yet arrived at its gate.

The airport screening will be expanded over the next week to New Jersey's Newark Liberty, Washington Dulles, Chicago O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.

About 150 people enter the United States every day from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and nearly all of them come through the five airports doing the screening.

Airports in Canada and Europe plan to take similar measures in coming days.

But even as nations try to reassure citizens they are doing all they can to prevent an outbreak within their borders, public-health officials cautioned that the only way to eliminate the threat posed by the virus would be to defeat it in West Africa.

'As Ebola continues its slow-motion incursion into developed countries, right now the U.S. and Spain, there is an understandable level of fear growing among people about this terrible virus, even though the chances of seeing anything like the calamity in western Africa is profoundly remote,' said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and a special adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York.

While the screenings might catch a few cases, he said, the focus needs to remain on battling the disease at its source, he said.

The difficulty of monitoring people without symptoms but thought to have been at risk of exposure to Ebola was demonstrated late Friday when the New Jersey Health Department ordered a crew from NBC News that recently returned from Liberia into quarantine.

The crew included the network's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, who lives in Princeton, N.J. Snyderman had been covering the outbreak alongside Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman who was infected with the virus. Mukpo, 33, is being treated in isolation at a hospital in Omaha.

Authorities declined to provide information about the other crew members ordered into quarantine.

New Jersey health officials said that upon returning from Liberia, the crew members agreed to isolate themselves and monitor themselves for 21 days, the longest documented period it has taken for someone infected with Ebola to develop symptoms.

'The NBC crew was ordered to be quarantined after failing to adhere to an agreement they made with health officials,' the department said in a statement. 'The order will be enforced by the Princeton Health Department in collaboration with the Princeton Police Department.'

The decision to screen travelers entering the U.S. was announced Wednesday, the day the first person with a case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States died.

That patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, traveled to Dallas from Liberia, and like all airline passengers leaving the West African countries at the center of the epidemic, he was screened for symptoms before being allowed to board his flight.

He did not have a fever or any other symptoms associated with Ebola when he left Liberia. He did not become ill until several days after he arrived in Dallas.

Under the new protocols, Customs and Border Protection officers have been directed to single out travelers arriving from the three countries based on their passport information.

If any travelers have a fever or other symptoms, or are revealed to have possible Ebola exposure, they will be evaluated by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quarantine officer.

'The public-health officer will again take a temperature reading and make a public-health assessment,' according to the guidelines released by the CDC.

Travelers who have no fever, symptoms or known history of exposure will receive health information for self-monitoring.

Buntouradu Bamgoura, 54, from Guinea, said she was examined by a health worker after a flight from Paris on Saturday. 'They did take my temperature,' Bamgoura said.

She said the examination was not burdensome and she was not taken to a separate room. 'It took like 15 minutes,' she said, adding that she felt fine.

When Nellon saw her two sons, she leaned toward them and opened her arms. As the three hugged, the boys confirmed they had their temperatures taken and were asked questions before boarding the plane. Then their mother hustled them away.

Material from is included in this report.



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