The US is planning to screen passengers at airports for the deadly Ebola virus, Barack Obama has said.
The US president admitted the chance of an Ebola outbreak in the US is “extremely unlikely” but said “we don’t have a lot of margin of error”.
Obama was speaking about the new measures at US airports following a meeting with health and security officials who are involved in attempting to prevent an outbreak of the disease.
“We're going to be working on protocols to do additional passenger screening, both at the source and here in the United States,” he said.
“All of these things make me confident that here in the United States at least the chances of an outbreak, of an epidemic here are extraordinarily low.”
“Procedures are now in place to rapidly evaluate anybody who might be showing symptoms.”
He added: “We saw that with the response of the airplane in Newark and how several hospitals across the United States have been testing for possible cases. In recent months we’ve had thousands of travellers arriving here from West Africa, and so far only one case of Ebola’s been diagnosed in the United States, and that’s the patient in Dallas.”
The president didn’t provide any further details on what extra methods will be used by airport security, but is expected to build on existing measures to look for signs of fever in travellers, possibly using infrared cameras to detect abnormal body temperatures.
The proposed new measures come six days after a Liberian man became the first case of Ebola diagnosed on US soil.
Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted the disease in Liberia, is currently being treated at a hospital isolation unit in Dallas.
More than 3,400 people have died in West Africa in the world's deadliest outbreak of the viral disease.