World steps up Ebola action as fear mounts

GENEVA (AFP) ― Western countries scrambled to review safety measures at airports and borders amid a mounting wave of fear that West Africa’s Ebola outbreak will spread worldwide.

As U.S. lawmakers grilled officials over how an infected nurse was allowed to board a crowded flight, European officials promised a review of how passengers from Ebola-hit countries are screened.

U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the Pentagon to send reservists to take part in a U.S. mission to combat the Ebola epidemic.

The World Health Organization vowed to ramp up its efforts to help 15 African countries defend themselves against the virus, which has already killed around 4,500 people.

France and Spain placed several potential victims under observation and in Liberia, the worst hit country so far, the minister of transport placed herself in quarantine after her driver died.

EU health commissioner Tonio Borg said the bloc would review exit screening of travelers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, in coordination with the WHO.

And EU health ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed to coordinate measures at entry points to the 28-member Union, although any decision on screening for Ebola rests with individual European countries.

A string of health workers have been evacuated back to Europe from Africa with Ebola, but the only confirmed case of transmission on the continent so far is a Spanish nurse in Madrid.

Doctors in Spain have identified six more cases of possible infection, including a missionary priest who recently returned from Liberia and has shown signs of fever.

And in France, a nurse who had earlier helped treat a returning Ebola patient was taken to a military hospital with what an official called a “suspect fever” ― though initial tests for the virus came back negative.

In the United States, two nurses who treated a Liberian traveler have now fallen ill, to the embarrassment of health authorities, who faced questioning about how the disease had spread.

The first of them, Nina Pham, was transferred from Texas to the National Institutes of Health outside of Washington late Thursday. She wore a white protective suit as she stepped off a plane an route to one of the top U.S. medical facilities.

In a brief video taken earlier while she was in Texas, Pham looked lucid and smiling as she spoke to her doctor.

“I love you guys,” an emotional Pham says, as she wipes away tears.

Pham and the second infected U.S. nurse were involved in the care of a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, who was the first Ebola case diagnosed in the United States.