Western nations scrambled to review safety measures at airports and borders amid a mounting wave of fear that west Africa’s Ebola outbreak will spread worldwide.
As US legislators grilled officials over how an infected nurse was allowed to board a crowded flight, European officials promised a review of how passengers from Ebola-hit countries are screened.
US President Barack Obama authorized the Pentagon to send reservists to take part in a US mission to combat the Ebola epidemic.
Photo: Reuters
The WHO vowed to ramp up its efforts to help 15 African countries defend themselves against the virus, which has already killed about 4,500 people.
France and Spain placed several potential victims under observation and in Liberia, the worst-hit country so far, the minister of transport placed herself in quarantine after her driver died.
EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy Tonio Borg said the bloc would review exit screening of travelers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, in coordination with the WHO.
And EU health ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed to coordinate measures at entry points to the 28-member EU, although any decision on screening for Ebola rests with individual nations.
A string of health workers have been evacuated back to Europe from Africa with Ebola, but the only confirmed case of transmission on the European continent so far is a Spanish nurse in Madrid.
Doctors in Spain have identified six more cases of possible infection, including a missionary priest who recently returned from Liberia and has shown signs of fever.
In France, a nurse who had earlier helped treat a returning Ebola patient was taken to a military hospital with what an official called a “suspect fever” — though initial tests came back negative.
In the US, two nurses who treated a Liberian traveler have now fallen ill, to the embarrassment of health authorities, who faced questioning about how the disease had spread.
The first of them, Nina Pham, was transferred from Texas to the National Institutes of Health outside of Washington late on Thursday. She wore a white protective suit as she stepped off an airplane en route to a top US medical facility.
In a brief video taken earlier while she was in Texas, Pham looked lucid and smiling as she spoke to her doctor.
“I love you guys,” Pham says as she wipes away tears.
Pham and the second infected US nurse were involved in the care of a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, who was the first Ebola case diagnosed in the US.
He died of the disease on Wednesday last week in Texas
Nursing unions claim the Texas hospital where the caregivers work had been ill-prepared, and US legislators are angry that one of the newly diagnosed patients was allowed to take a domestic flight despite mild fever symptoms.
As of Sunday, 4,493 people had died out of a total of 8,997 cases in the outbreak, according to the WHO, which has said that the infection rate could reach 10,000 a week by early December.
The vast majority of the cases have been in Liberia and its neighbors Sierra Leone and Guinea, which are also at the center of WHO efforts to contain the disease.
Eleven other African countries had also been singled out for special assistance.
“We need to make sure it doesn’t spread to other countries,” Isabelle Nuttall, head of the WHO’s alert and response arm, told reporters in Geneva.
Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan delivered stinging criticism of the world’s response, charging that wealthy countries were slow to tackle the crisis because it began in Africa.
“If the crisis had hit some other region, it probably would have been handled very differently,” the Ghanaian diplomat told the BBC program Newsnight.
“In fact, when you look at the evolution of the crisis, the international community really woke up when the disease got to America and Europe,” he said.
Airports in Britain, Canada and the US have already introduced stepped-up screening of travelers arriving from West Africa.
Young Chinese, many who fear age discrimination in their workplace after turning 35, are increasingly starting “one-person companies” that have artificial intelligence (AI) do most of the work. Smaller start-ups are already in vogue in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, with rapidly advancing AI tools seen as a welcome teammate even as they threaten layoffs at existing firms. More young people in China are subscribing to the model, as cities pledge millions of dollars in funding and rent subsidies for such ventures, in alignment with Beijing’s political goal of “technological self-reliance.” “The one-person company is a product of the AI era,” said Karen Dai
South Korea’s air force yesterday apologized for a 2021 midair collision involving two fighter jets, a day after auditors said the pilots were taking selfies and filming during the flight and held them responsible for the accident. “We sincerely apologize to the public for the concern caused by the accident that occurred in 2021,” an air force spokesman told a news conference, adding that one of the pilots involved had been suspended from flying duties, received severe disciplinary action and has since left the military. The apology followed a report released on Wednesday by the South Korean Board of Audit and Inspection,
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