Obama Orders Rapid Response Team For Ebola İn The Us

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was ordered Wednesday by President Barack Obama to establish a rapid response team to deal with the Ebola virus in the U.S.



Obama cancelled previously scheduled campaign trips to convene a Cabinet meeting to discuss his administration's response to U.S. cases of the virus.



Briefing reporters at the White House following the meeting, the president said that health officials are examining everything that happened since Thomas Eric Duncan was initially taken to a Dallas hospital exhibiting symptoms of the disease. Duncan was the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. and subsequently died last week.



Two nurses who helped to treat Duncan at Texas Presbyterian Hospital tested positive for the virus, raising fears of an outbreak in the U.S.



"I am absolutely confident that we can prevent a serious outbreak of the disease here in the United States," Obama said. "But it becomes more difficult to do so if this epidemic of Ebola rages out of control in West Africa," he said, while adding that the risk of a serious outbreak in the U.S. is "extraordinarily low."



The Ebola virus has killed more than 4,000 people in West Africa and could infect as many as 1.4 million people by mid-January, according to World Health Organization estimates.



www.aa.com.tr/en - Washington DC