Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/400396
ByJimKuhnhenn The Associated Press WASHINGTON President Barack Obama turned to a trusted adviser to lead the nation's Ebola response on Friday as efforts to clamp down on any possible route of infection from three Texas cases expanded, reaching a cruise ship at sea and multiple airline flights. Facing renewed criticism of his handling of the Ebola risk, Obama will make Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, his point man on the U.S. fight against Ebola at home and in West Africa. Klain will report to national se- curity adviser Susan Rice and to homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, the White House said. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization admit- ted to mistakes of its own in failing to contain the out- break still spreading out of control in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. "Nearly everyone in- volved in the outbreak re- sponse failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," the U.N. health agency said in a draft inter- nal document obtained by The Associated Press. The response was marred by in- competency and ineffective bureaucracy, the document says, and experts should have realized that tradi- tional containment meth- ods wouldn't work in an African region with porous borders and broken health systems. Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, Obama on Thursday said that he was not "philosoph- ically opposed" to consider- ing restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola- stricken West African na- tions. But he said health and security experts con- tinue to tell him that the screening measures al- ready in place for travelers are more effective. White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Friday re- affirmed the White House's current opposition to such restrictions. "At this point, if our core priority is protecting the American public, then we're not going to put in place a travel ban," he said. Government officials said early Friday that they had been seeking to remove from a Caribbean cruise ship a Dallas health care worker who handled an Eb- ola lab specimen, although she has shown no signs of infection for 19 days. But the ship did not get clearance to dock in Cozumel, Mexico, on Friday, a day after officials in Belize would not allow the woman or her spouse to leave, a Carnival Cruise Lines spokeswoman said. The cruise line said the ship was now on the way to its home port of Galves- ton, Texas, for its originally scheduled return of Sunday morning. The cruise com- pany said that the woman, a lab supervisor traveling with her spouse, remained in isolation "and is not deemed to be a risk to any guests or crew." Still, under new tighter travel rules placed on the staff of a Dallas hospital where two nurses caught Ebola from a Liberian pa- tient, the woman would not have been permitted to be on the ship. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms appear. Ebola isn't spread through the air like the flu; people catch it by direct contact with a sick person's bodily fluids, such as blood or vomit. Doctors at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland said that a Dallas nurse, Nina Pham, brought there for Ebola treatment was very tired but resting comfortably Friday in "fair" condition. The second nurse to con- tract Ebola, Amber Vinson, was being treated at Em- ory University Hospital in Atlanta, as precautions re- lated to her personal travel spiraled wider. Passengers and crew aboard seven Frontier Air- lines flights were affected, too, as well as a handful of people in the Akron, Ohio, area. DISEASE Obama taps Ebola 'czar' as precautions expand JACQUELYNMARTIN—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, le , and Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, far right, listen as President Barack Obama speaks to the media about the government's Ebola response, in the Oval Office on Thursday in Washington. By Maria Cheng The Associated Press LONDON In a draft doc- ument, the World Health Organization has acknowl- edged that it botched at- tempts to stop the now- spiraling Ebola outbreak in West Africa, blaming factors including incom- petent staff and a lack of information. In the document ob- tained by The Associated Press, the agency wrote that experts should have realized that traditional infectious disease contain- ment methods wouldn't work in a region with po- rous borders and broken health systems. "Nearly everyone in- volved in the outbreak re- sponse failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," WHO said in the document. "A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force." The U.N. health agency acknowledged that, at times, even its own bu- reaucracy was a problem. It noted that the heads of WHO country offices in Af- rica are "politically moti- vated appointments" made by the WHO regional di- rector for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not an- swer to the agency's chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan. WHO is the U.N.'s spe- cialized health agency, re- sponsible for setting global health standards and co- ordinating the global re- sponse to disease out- breaks. The document — a time- line on the Ebola outbreak — was not issued publicly but the AP was told the health agency would be re- leasing it earlier this week. However, WHO officials said in an email Friday that the timeline would now probably not be re- leased publicly. No official at the agency would com- ment Friday on the draft report. Dr. Peter Piot, the co- discoverer of the Ebola vi- rus, agreed in an interview Friday that WHO acted far too slowly, largely because of its Africa office. "It's the regional office in Africa that's the front line," he said at his of- fice in London. "And they didn't do anything. That office is really not compe- tent." WHO's other regional directors — the Ameri- cas, Southeast Asia, Eu- rope, Eastern Mediter- ranean and the Western Pacific — are also not ac- countable to Geneva and are all elected by their re- gions. Piot, director of the London School of Hy- giene and Tropical Medi- cine, also questioned why it took WHO five months and 1,000 deaths before the agency declared Eb- ola an international health emergency in Au- gust. "I called for a state of emergency to be de- clared in July and for mil- itary operations to be de- ployed," Piot said. But he said WHO might have been scarred by its expe- rience during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when it was slammed for hyping the situation. In late April, during a teleconference on Eb- ola among infectious dis- ease experts that included WHO officials, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questions were raised about the performance of WHO experts, as not all of them bothered to send Eb- ola reports to WHO head- quarters, according to the draft document. 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