U.S, to Begin Ebola Screening at 5 Airports

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government will begin taking the temperatures of travelers from West Africa arriving at five U.S. airports as part of a stepped-up response to the Ebola epidemic.

President Barack Obama said the new efforts would provide yet another tier of protection at key U.S. points of entry.

"These measures are really just belt-and-suspenders -- it's an added layer of protection on top of the procedures already in place at several airports," Obama told state and local officials in a teleconference call Wednesday.

However, the focus is still on stopping the epidemic in West Africa, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, said in Atlanta.

"As long as Ebola continues to spread in Africa, we can't make the risk zero, here," he said.

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest said the additional layer of screening would begin at New York's JFK International and the international airports in Newark, Washington Dulles, Chicago and Atlanta. He said the new steps would include taking temperatures and would begin Saturday at JFK.

Frieden said temperatures would be taken with a device that would avoid direct contact with the travelers.

Obama said the new measures also will include more screening questions for passengers arriving from the countries worst hit by the outbreak - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. He says the procedures will allow United States officials to isolate, evaluate and monitor travelers and collect any information about their contacts.

Earnest said the five airports cover the destinations of 94 percent of the people who travel to the U.S. from the three heavily hit countries in West Africa - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. He estimated that about 150 people would be checked a day under the new procedures.

A Liberian man who had come to the U.S. with Ebola died Wednesday. Forty-two-year-old Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed in the U.S. with the disease, had come to Dallas in late September but did not display obvious signs of having Ebola when he entered the U.S.