Obama may appoint an 'Ebola czar'

Obama may appoint an &#039;Ebola czar&#039;

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama said Thursday that he may appoint an Ebola "czar," or a single official handling the containment of Ebola in the U.S., "just to make sure that we are crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's going forward." The two nurses who contracted the disease in Dallas from dying patient Thomas Duncan have both been moved to special hospitals in Atlanta and outside Washington.

Obama said that an Ebola czar would make sense because other public health officials — notably, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief Dr. Thomas Frieden, who faced a rough grilling before an election-season House panel on Thursday — "are also responsible for a whole bunch of other stuff."

Obama also said he has no "philosophical objection necessarily to a travel ban" for people from West Africa, as several Republican officials have called for, but that the experts say such a ban could make the situation worse. "The most important thing I can do for keeping the American people safe is for us to be able to deal with Ebola at the source, where you have a huge outbreak in West Africa," Obama added.

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Although only two people have contracted the disease in the U.S., Ebola fear is spreading. In an Oct. 8-12 poll by the Harvard School of Public Health, 52 percent of respondents said they are concerned there will be a major Ebola outbreak in the U.S. But even in August, long before there were any U.S. cases, 39 percent of respondents gave the same answer. In Thursday's hearing, Frieden told lawmakers that Ebola is not a "significant public-health threat to the United States."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.