NEW YORK — As Ebola continues to ravage West Africa and fears grow that the virus will spread around the globe, enhanced screenings at US airports began Saturday at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Travelers coming from three hard-hit African countries are being singled out, having their temperatures taken and questioned about their possible exposure to Ebola.
Kennedy was the first of five US airports to step up screening protocols, and the new measures were the latest indication of the risk the disease presents.
Beginning next week, Washington Dulles, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, and Atlanta international airports will employ the same stepped-up screenings as those put in place at Kennedy. About 150 people enter the United States every day from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and nearly all of them come through those five airports.
Airports in Canada and Europe plan to take similar measures in coming days.
But even as nations try to reassure anxious citizens they are doing all they can to prevent an outbreak within their borders, public health officials cautioned that the only way to truly eliminate the threat posed by the virus would be to defeat it in West Africa.
“As Ebola continues its slow-motion incursion into developed countries, right now the US and Spain, there is an understandable level of fear growing among people about this terrible virus, even though the chances of seeing anything like the calamity in western Africa is profoundly remote,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and a special adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York.
While the screenings might catch a few cases, he said, the focus needed to remain on battling the disease at its source and reacting quickly and effectively to new cases when they appear.
The difficulty and complexity of monitoring people without symptoms but thought to have been at risk of exposure to Ebola was demonstrated on Friday night when the New Jersey Health Department ordered a crew from NBC News that recently returned from Liberia into quarantine.
The crew included the network’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, who lives in Princeton, N.J. Snyderman had been covering the outbreak alongside Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman who was infected with the virus. Mukpo is being treated in isolation at a hospital in Omaha.
New Jersey health officials said that upon returning from Liberia, the crew members agreed to isolate themselves from the community and monitor themselves for 21 days, the longest documented period of time it has taken for someone infected with Ebola to develop symptoms.
“The NBC crew was ordered to be quarantined after failing to adhere to an agreement they made with health officials,” the department said in a statement. “The order will be enforced by the Princeton Health Department in collaboration with the Princeton Police Department. The NBC crew remains symptom-free, so there is no reason for concern of exposure to the community.”
A spokesman for NBC News declined to comment on the quarantine, but said the crew was complying with the department’s orders.
The decision to screen travelers entering the United States was announced on Wednesday, the day the first person with a case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States died.
Thomas Duncan traveled to Dallas from Liberia, and like all airline passengers leaving the West African countries at the center of the epidemic, he was screened for symptoms before being allowed to board his flight.
Duncan did not yet have a fever or any other symptoms associated with Ebola when he left Liberia. He did not fall ill until several days after he arrived in Dallas.