Obama Warns Ebola Threat Remains Until Outbreak Halted in Africa

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama said the death of an Ebola patient in Nebraska yesterday is a reminder of how the danger will remain until the outbreak is contained at the source in Africa.

“We are nowhere near out of the woods yet” in Africa, the president said at the White House as he convened national security and health officials to discuss the latest efforts to fight the disease.

With the number of cases increasing in Sierra Leone, “some of the international coordination still needs to improve,” he said. Congress needs to approve legislation to fund prevention efforts, and “we should not feel complacent,” he said.

The White House meeting comes a day after the death of Martin Salia in a special isolation unit at the Nebraska Medical Center. Salia was evacuated to the U.S. from Sierra Leone after being mistakenly cleared at first of having Ebola. By the time he arrived, his illness had advanced. The physician from Sierra Leone was a permanent resident of the U.S.

While the second Ebola death in the U.S. brought renewed attention to the danger, almost all the nearly 14,000 cases and about 5,000 fatalities counted by the World Health Organization have been in three countries in West Africa.

Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man visiting Texas to get married, was the first person to die from Ebola in the U.S.

Three Countries

Obama, just back from a weeklong trip to Asia and Australia, is overseeing the U.S. effort to contain the outbreak at its source in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Salia’s death points to the difficulty, especially in Africa, of quickly and accurately diagnosing patients with Ebola, so they can be treated and isolated to avoid spreading the virus. The WHO in an e-mail today said rapid diagnostic tests that can be administered in the field may significantly improve outcomes. Companies developing new Ebola tests include Corgenix Medical Corp., Roche Holding AG and Cepheid.

Existing tests take from two to six hours to get results and cost about $100, WHO said in the e-mail. In rural West Africa, it can take several days to get results because blood samples have to be transported to laboratories through areas with poor roads.

“These requirements are difficult to meet in resource- constrained West African setting, thus severely limiting testing capacity,” the organization said.

–With assistance from Catherine Larkin in Chicago.

To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Greiling Keane in Washington at [e-mail] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at [e-mail] Mark McQuillan