CDC

May 23 (UPI) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday added two more airports that travelers to the United States can be routed through for Ebola screening when entering the country.

The enhanced travel screening announced earlier this week by the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security is meant to screen people for the virus on entry to the country if they have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or Uganda.

The outbreak, which started in the DRC and has spread to neighboring South Sudan and Uganda, is estimated to have 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths, the World Health Organization on Friday said, adding that the “real scale of the outbreak is likely far larger.”

The CDC first issued restrictions on Thursday for Americans returning to the United States to be screened at Washington Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., before continuing on to their final destinations.

The two additional airports will be Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which started to accept travelers at 11:59 p.m. EDT on Friday, and George W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, which will start to accept travelers on Tuesday, May 26, at 11:59 p.m. EDT, the CDC said on Saturday.

“These travelers will have their air travel re-routed to arrive at select airports,” CDC officials said in the update.

The enhanced health screening includes being escorted to a designated screening area; completing a questionnaire about their travel history and symptoms; having their temperatures checked using non-contact thermometers; and observation by CDC staff for signs of illness.

“Travelers with fever or other symptoms that could be Ebola will receive additional evaluation by a CDC public health officer,” the agency said.

“If the assessment shows that a traveler may be sick with Ebola, the traveler will be transferred to a hospital for further medical evaluation,” it said.

The WHO on Friday raised the national risk assessment during the outbreak in the DRC to “very high,” but officials said that global risk for infection with the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, for which there is no approved vaccine.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus during a meeting on Friday thanked the efforts of neighboring nations in Africa who have assisted during the outbreak, as well as the various regional and global health agencies that also have done so.

Although the United States last year pulled out of the WHO, the U.S. State Department said on Saturday that it has activated a dedicated Ebola Response Task Force that is led by “senior experts with direct experience managing prior Ebola outbreaks” in 2014 and 2018.

The department also has deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team and provided $32 million in assistance to U.S. partners in the region, it said in a press release.

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May 18 (UPI) — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday restricted non-U.S. passport holders from entering the United States if they have been in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or South Sudan in the past 21 days.

The agency made the announcement as there have at least 346 cases and 88 deaths in the DRC, on top of several cases that have been confirmed in nearby nations in people who been there, the CDC said over the weekend.

The CDC said that is coordinating with various agencies and companies to manage travelers who have been exposed to Ebola as it also deploys employees to support containment of the outbreak in the three nations.

“CDC assess the immediate risk to the general U.S. public as low, but we will continue to evaluate the evolving situation and may adjust public health measures as additional information becomes available,” the agency said in a situation summary.

In the last five days, the World Health Organization confirmed that the Ebola virus circulating in the three countries right now is the Bundibuyo virus, one of four known strains that have affected humans since Ebola was discovered in mid-1970s.

Although there is an approved, licensed vaccine against Ebola which has successfully been used to quell outbreaks, the vaccine — called Ervebo — only protects against acquisition of the Zaire species of Ebola virus, making it useless in the current outbreak, according to the CDC.

WHO on Saturday declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

In its update, WHO said that there are “significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread associated with this event at the present time. In addition, there is limited understanding of the epidemiologic links with known or suspected cases.”

Ebola spreads from wild animals to humans and from human to human through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids from infected individuals, and carries a case fatality rate of roughly 50%.

A number of affected Americans have reportedly been exposed to the virus during the outbreak.

The CDC has recommended that people who have traveled through the two countries in the last 21 days should immediately seek medical attention if they develop Ebola symptoms, which can include fever, weakness, vomiting, diarrhea or unexplained bleeding.

In addition to roughly 30 CDC employees dispatched to the region, and will join officials from several other global and regional health agencies, the WHO is expected to convene an emergency committee to advise the agency’s director-general on its response the outbreak.

NEW YORK — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

To President Trump, “we seem to have things under very good control,” as he told reporters Friday evening.

To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the last week.

“The CDC is not even a player,” said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.

Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain’s Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate U.S. passengers from the ship to a University of Nebraska quarantine center for evaluation and monitoring. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.

At their first briefing, held Saturday by telephone only for invited reporters, officials pledged to be transparent in updating the public but said the media could not cite the speakers by name under rules set by aides to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They did not directly answer a question about whether the U.S. passengers could leave the university medical facility when they wanted.

The CDC’s diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

How the outbreak unfolded

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man’s wife and a German woman who both died.

Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

It’s WHO taking center stage

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.

Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world’s premier public health agency.

But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.

Tumult under Trump

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency’s ship sanitation program.

As this was playing out, Kennedy said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

Waiting to hear from the CDC

The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.

The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”

Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”

The CDC’s acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.

The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.

But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.

COVID-19 comparison

In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside China.

The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.

Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC’s lack of trying.

“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency’s work now is delayed and subdued.

Instead of working with nearly all of the world’s nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.

That’s not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can’t possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.

Stobbe writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday nominated Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general, to be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a social media post, Trump described Schwartz as “incredibly talented” and said, “She is a STAR!”

The Atlanta-based CDC, which is charged with protecting Americans from preventable health threats, has been in turmoil since Trump returned to office more than a year ago, with a succession of mostly temporary leaders.

The agency is overseen by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had promised not to change the nation’s vaccination schedule. But shortly after taking office, Kennedy said he was going to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule and went on to attempt a substantial rewrite of vaccine recommendations for kids. Some of those efforts were put on hold recently by a federal judge.

The administration’s first pick to run the CDC was former Florida congressman Dr. David Weldon, but his March 2025 Senate confirmation hearing was canceled an hour before it was to begin. Weldon said at the time that he’d been told not enough senators were willing to vote for him.

The White House then moved on to Susan Monarez, who had been serving as the CDC’s acting director. Monarez was confirmed by the Senate, but she was ousted in less than a month. Trump administration officials said she wasn’t aligned with their agenda so they terminated her.

Several key CDC scientific leaders resigned in protest, saying Monarez’s dismissal dashed their hopes that a CDC director would be able to guard against political meddling in the agency’s scientific research and health recommendations.

Since then, there’s been a revolving door in agency leadership, with the short-term role of acting director being passed from one Washington-based Health and Human Services official to another. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya has been overseeing the CDC the past several weeks.

During a House Appropriations Committee hearing Thursday, Kennedy said the new CDC team was “extraordinary.”

“I think this new team is really going to be able to revolutionize CDC and get it back on track,” he said.

Schwartz holds multiple academic credentials, including both medical and law degrees. Her career has largely been spent in military uniform, including in a leadership position at the U.S. Coast Guard where she oversaw the organization’s system of 41 clinics and 150 sick bays.

She later served as deputy surgeon general, where she helped lead uniformed medical and health professionals posted at the CDC and government health agencies that serve the general public.

Schwartz could not be reached for comment.

Trump also announced the appointment of Sean Slovenski, a former Walmart executive, as CDC deputy director and chief operating officer. Dr. Jennifer Shuford, Texas health commissioner, was named the CDC’s deputy director and chief medical officer. And Dr. Sara Brenner, a former Food and Drug Administration administrator, was designated as a senior counselor for public health to Kennedy.

In a social media post Thursday, Kennedy congratulated Schwartz and the other appointees and said he looks “forward to working together to restore trust, accountability, and scientific integrity” at the CDC.

But Aaron Siri, a lawyer and ally of Kennedy in attacking vaccines and pharmaceutical companies, criticized Schwartz’s selection. In a social media post, Siri lambasted Schwartz’s past promotion of vaccinations and said “she lacks the basic ethics and morals to lead the CDC.”

Schwartz’s nomination comes as Dr. Casey Means, Trump’s pick for another key health-related role, U.S. surgeon general, has had difficulty getting confirmed.

Means’ languishing nomination after appearing for a confirmation hearing in February reflects the skepticism that lawmakers of both parties have expressed toward the direction in which Kennedy has taken his department.

Stobbe writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Ali Swenson contributed to this report.