Ebola Screenings to Begin at Major U.S. Airports
BLITZER: Aviation correspondent Rene Marsh is at Washington's Dulles International Airport. What's the latest over there?</s>RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, in less than 48 hours, we will begin to see the more rigorous screening procedures roll out at U.S. airports. Of course, the goal is to play defense against the deadly Ebola virus. But even before the security or the screening measures begin, already some people are questioning how effective they will be.</s>MARSH (voice-over): At airports in West Africa, in countries hardest hit by the Ebola virus, everyone departing is checked for a fever. Now five major U.S. airports are about to begin temperature checks for travelers when they land here. But some experts say the new screening provides a false sense of security.</s>DR. AMESH ADALJA, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH MEDICAL CENTER: People can take Tylenol. They can take ibuprofen, and they can mask that fever. So this can't a full-proof strategy for keeping Ebola out of the country.</s>MARSH: Over the last few months, authorities at West African airports denied boarding to 77 people with fevers or other Ebola symptoms. None of those cases turned out to be the disease.</s>ADALJA: You have to remember, people have fevers for lots of reasons and you're going to be looking, really, for a needle in a haystack. Mr. Duncan wouldn't have been identified by this -- by temperature screening.</s>MARSH: Temperature checks were announced after Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S., died in a Dallas hospital Wednesday. The CDC does not believe Duncan had any Ebola symptoms when he arrived. U.S. officials acknowledge that, even with the new measures, more Ebola cases could arrive in the</s>U.S. SYLVIA MATHEWS BURWELL, HHS SECRETARY: I don't think we're making a claim that anything is 100 percent secure. But what's most importantly, we know.</s>MARSH: Now authorities in England are ramping up their screening procedures in two London airports and its EuroRail train stations. And Canada is planning increased screening, as well.</s>JEH JOHNSON, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: My goal is that we create internationally as many different checkpoints as possible for travelers who go through the system.</s>MARSH: Meanwhile, in New York, 200 workers at LaGuardia's Airport walk off the job, following ongoing complaints they say include a lack of equipment and training.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Ebola scare is one of the huge parts of it, because the workers are cleaning the planes. They find all kinds -- all sorts of things: needles, you know, vomit, all kinds of stuff.</s>MARSH: Well, their employer has a different story, saying that they updated those employees on new Ebola protocols just last week. However, we just a short time ago heard from the Port Authority. They say they've agreed to listen to these workers' concerns. After hearing that, the workers said they will return to work. Back to you, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: All right, Rene. Thanks very much. Rene Marsh over at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. Let's dig deeper. Joining us, our CNN anchor, the aviation correspondent Richard Quest, and our chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, let's talk a little bit about these screenings at airports. By no means they're going to be perfect. People will slip through, right?</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I think there's no question. I think the context is important here. You know, fever is often the first sign that someone is starting to get sick. And that's why it's an effective potential screening tool. But keep in mind, you know, we talk about this known as the incubation period. That is the time between exposure and the time someone starts to develop symptoms. It can be as long as 21 days. It's typically somewhere around eight days. It's those days in between. You've been exposed, but you don't yet develop symptoms, you're getting on a plane. The screening is not going to pick that up. Now I do want to point out one thing, Wolf. If you look back over the past couple of months, they've been doing these exit screenings out of these West African countries, about 36,000 people have been screened. A quarter of those people going to the United States. Seventy-seven of those people had a fever, 77 out of 36,000. And we know none of them -- they were found to have other causes for the fever. None of them were found to have Ebola. So we're not talking about particularly large numbers here. But again, to your point, there is a period of time when someone could potentially sneak through.</s>BLITZER: And if someone had a fever on the plane, they could take an Advil or a Tylenol or some other medication, and the fever would go away, right?</s>GUPTA: Yes. I mean, look, if someone wanted to game the system, so to speak, they could even take a Tylenol or something before they got to the airport before the screening and then potentially get through that way. You know, when people start to develop higher fevers, they likely have other symptoms. So if they're examined, you look in their eyes start to develop redness, these types of things, they may come under a little bit more scrutiny. But certainly, if the thought is that someone knows they've been exposed, they now want to get out of Liberia or Sierra Leone or Guinea, wherever it may be, they could take a Tylenol. They could do something like that and expose the imperfections, if you will, of the system.</s>BLITZER: Richard, you're here in Washington. There's a meeting of world leaders going on at the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. What are you hearing about what the international community should be doing to deal with this Ebola crisis?</s>RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: This is not about policy now, Wolf. This is about practicality. What we heard today from the head of the IMF and the World Bank, they need basic raw resources. Medicines, beds, tents, mobile hospitals. And most importantly, they need qualified staff to go there. The president of the World Bank said to me today that the U.S. hospital system have not yet provided sufficient numbers of people to go there and help. And that's what they're really calling for. This is now all about literally medical boots on the ground.</s>BLITZER: This is an international crisis, and literally hundreds of thousands, about a million could potentially be infected in Africa if nothing is done between now and January or February. That's what the CDC of Atlanta is saying. Sanjay, just getting word, and I want your reaction from Spain that seven more people have now been admitted to hospitals. Fears of Ebola growing there. We heard about that one nurse who has Ebola, contracted it in Spain. It looks like there are 14 people in hospitals in Spain dealing with this crisis. Give us some perspective.</s>GUPTA: Well, there's a lot of fear, and there's some collision of fear and what will actually turn out to be true Ebola may be a much smaller number if any of those people at all. You know, this is a person we know who was moving around the city. May have had a mild fever at that point, and obviously, the concern is, could she potentially have been infectious at that time? I can tell you, typically with mild fever, people aren't spreading the disease. It's when they get quite sick, and the virus is in their bodily fluids, and those bodily fluids get on somebody else. That's when they start spreading the disease. So look, I understand the fear, and they're probably going to look at these people carefully, see if they can get sick, and if they do get sick, it will test them. But I think statistically, if you had to look at it, the odds are probably on their sides still that they're going to be OK.</s>BLITZER: The initial person who got Ebola in Spain is a health worker, a nurse's assistant. I assume health workers all over the world are pretty nervous right now.</s>GUPTA: You know, it's interesting, Wolf. When this first happened, we've been looking at what happened to this particular nurse, and, you know, the idea that she got sick, she wasn't sure about how she got sick initially, and people started to speculate, does that mean that Ebola is transmitting in a different way? I mean, healthcare workers are getting sick. And what we found out subsequently, that she likely touched a part of her skin with a glove that may have been contaminated. The point is this, that, you know, there's a human error component to this. There are breaches to protocol, which is why healthcare workers could possibly get sick. They're the ones taking care of sick patients. But to -- to extrapolate and say, well, this now means Ebola is transmitting more quickly, more widely in some ways, I don't think it means that. So I think the science stays the same. The fear grows, which is understandable, but the science hasn't changed.</s>BLITZER: Richard, you saw in New York these workers who clean plans, they're on strike right now. They're afraid to go into those planes because of needles there, vomiting there. What's going on here, because I'm sure that they are very, very worried about what's going on?</s>QUEST: What's going on is unbridled fear now, and it will get worse and it will grow until the crisis is put to bed. What the World Bank basically said today, Wolf, which is really interesting, is if you look at what the U.S. is doing at the airports, this is the equivalent of putting a wet towel under the door of a building on fire. It's not going to do much good. The only way to deal with this crisis, Wolf, they believe, all the experts say, is where the fire is, and that's in West Africa. More resources need to go there.</s>BLITZER: Is it fair, Sanjay, to say that planes in general, when you get on a plane, whether a small or a big plane, that there's potentially a lot of stuff on that plane where you can get infected?</s>GUPTA: I think it's a theoretical possibility. And you know, that obviously -- you know, when you're the person on the plane and you hear it's a theoretical possibility, that -- that's frightening. It's not likely to happen. I mean, if someone actually had contaminated a plane, someone who had been ill and subsequently found to have Ebola, could the virus still live on some surfaces? Yes. The answer is yes, it could live on surfaces. Is it likely to get somebody else sick? It could happen and, you know, we're dabbling on the edges here, Wolf, a bit. But again, if you're the person who is going to potentially be on that plane next, you can understand the fear.</s>BLITZER: Sanjay, thank you very much. Richard Quest, Sanjay Gupta, appreciate it. Just ahead, another story we're following: an officer involved a shooting in the St. Louis area sparking a violent night of protests only miles away from where Michael Brown died in Ferguson, Missouri. New details now about the multiple shots fired between a white police officer and young African-American man.