Obama open to appointing Ebola chief

President Barack Obama is considering stepping up the US response to the Ebola crisis by appointing an "Ebola czar" to lead efforts against the disease.

He has also refused to rule out travel bans, saying he would consider this option if experts changed their view that such action would be more effective.

Speaking after meeting senior aides at the White House, Mr Obama said that government healthcare officials were trying to track anyone who was in proximity to the Texas nurse who travelled on a commercial airline on Monday night, hours before she became the third person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the US.

Seven people in Ohio were quarantined, six airline crew members were put on three weeks of paid leave and schools in two states were closed for cleaning after Amber Joy Vinson was found to have travelled on a flight from Cleveland to Dallas.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the US agency overseeing the response to the Ebola cases, said that it had started to trace passengers who flew on the same flight that Ms Vinson, 29, took last Friday from Dallas to Cleveland. This came a day after it started to trace travellers who flew on Monday’s flight.

Mr Obama said that he would consider appointing someone with sole responsibility for handling the response to the Ebola cases, noting that the senior officials dealing with the crisis had other national security and healthcare tasks.

The president made his comments after meeting senior advisers including health secretary Sylvia Burrell, the Centres for Disease Control director Thomas Frieden and his counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco.

“It may be appropriate for me to appoint an additional person, not because these three haven’t been doing an outstanding job, really working hard on this issue, but [because] they are also responsible for a whole bunch of other stuff,” he said.

The White House had insisted earlier in the week that various government agencies were working well in coordinating action against the disease.

The emergence of a second nurse to be diagnosed with the virus and her travel on two internal flights after she cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died from Ebola last week, has heaped pressure on the Obama administration.

The president has faced increased calls, mostly from Republicans, to introduce a temporary travel ban to reduce the risk of infected people travelling from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia where Ebola has killed more than 4,000 people.

“I don’t have a philosophical objection necessarily to a travel ban if that is what is going to keep the American people safe,” he told reporters.

“The trouble is all the discussion I have had so far with experts in the field is that it is less effective than the measures we are already implementing.”

Speaking after a high-level meeting on Ebola for the second day in a row, Mr Obama said that a ban might increase the likelihood of travellers avoiding detection by undertaking “broken travel.”

“They are less likely to get screened and we may have more cases of Ebola rather than less,” he said.

Healthcare officials stressed that risk of exposure for travellers who flew on the same flights as Ms Vinson was low but still intensified their checks and monitoring.

The nurse travelled to Cleveland to meet family and plan for a wedding. She returned to Dallas on Monday with a low fever and was diagnosed the next day.

Classrooms in Ohio schools were closed to be disinfected after it emerged that some students and staff may have travelled on the same plane as Ms Vinson.

US healthcare officials transferred Nina Pham, 26, the first nurse to be diagnosed with Ebola, to the National Institute of Health just outside Washington DC in Bethesda, Maryland. She, like Ms Vinson, had cared for Mr Duncan at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas after he was diagnosed last month.

The Liberian man contracted the virus in West Africa before he flew to the US on September 20th. He was initially sent home by the Dallas hospital on September 26th before returning two days later in a deteriorated condition. He was diagnosed with Ebola, the first case in the US, on September 28th and died on October 8th.