WASHINGTON — Ebola has arrived in the United States and people are frightened.
The nation’s top infectious diseases expert said it’s perfectly normal to feel anxious about a disease that kills so fast and is ravaging parts of West Africa.
“People who are scared, I say, we don’t take lightly your fear. We respect it. We understand it,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday.
But West Africa, because of the weaknesses in its health system, is not the United States, Fauci said, predicting “we won’t have an outbreak.” Scientists know how to stop the virus from spreading.
That’s not to say the first Ebola case diagnosed within the United States — a traveler from Liberia who began feeling the effects after arriving in Dallas — will be the only one.
The government took measures this past week to ensure hospitals are ready.
Despite some initial missteps in Dallas, tried-and-true methods are underway: tracking everyone who came into contact with the infected man and isolating anyone who shows symptoms.
What to know about Ebola in America:
How it spreads
Ebola doesn’t spread easily like the flu, a cold or measles.
The virus isn’t airborne. Instead, it’s in a sick person’s bodily fluids, such as blood, vomit, urine, semen or saliva. Another person can catch the disease by getting those germs into his own body, perhaps by wiping his eyes or through a cut in the skin.
Bodily fluids aren’t contagious until the infected person begins to feel sick. The initial symptoms are easily confused with other illnesses, however: fever, headaches, flu-like body aches and abdominal pain. Vomiting, diarrhea and sometimes bleeding follow as the disease progresses, increasing the risk to others.
In West Africa, the disease has spread quickly to family members who tended the sick or handled their bodies after death, and infected doctors and nurses working under punishing conditions, without proper equipment. Bed sheets or clothing contaminated by bodily fluids also spread the disease.
Can you catch it on a bus or a plane?
It’s very unlikely.
To be on the safe side, the CDC defines “contact” with the disease as spending a prolonged period of time within 3 feet of someone ill with Ebola, a distance designed to protect health workers from projectile vomiting.
But health officials haven’t seen real world cases of the virus spread by casual contact in public, such as sitting next to someone on a bus, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC director.
“All of our experience with Ebola in Africa the last four decades indicates direct contact is how it spreads,” he said, “and only direct contact with someone who is ill with Ebola.”
What officials are doing
The CDC is overseeing multiple layers of response:
• The Ebola-hit African nations are checking people at airports for fever, and asking them about any contact with an infected person, before allowing them to board planes out of the country.
• Airlines are required by law to watch for sick travelers and to alert authorities before landing.
• The CDC is warning doctors and hospitals to remember the possibility of Ebola and rapidly isolate and test sick patients with a risk of exposure to the virus, primarily those who have traveled recently from the hot spots.