SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Twelve years ago, a deadly Ebola outbreak hit West Africa. The United States was at the forefront of the response, sending thousands of people to help stop the transmission. As the world faces a new Ebola outbreak of international concern, NPR's Pien Huang looks back on the 2014 response.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Dr. Tom Frieden was director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2014.
TOM FRIEDEN: This was the world's first Ebola epidemic. There was no playbook for this. And there is often in the early stages of an epidemic a kind of fog-of-war reality.
HUANG: Cases were rising. People were dying. Ebola was devastating to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and had potential consequences beyond.
FRIEDEN: We could see a future in which Ebola spread for months or years throughout much of Africa and endangered travel, tourism, the economy for much of the world.
HUANG: So the U.S. government took on a leading role. They established a White House Ebola czar and sent more than 3,000 U.S. personnel to West Africa from the military, CDC and USAID. They helped treat the ill, bury the dead and keep close track of who had been exposed to sick patients. Neil Vora deployed with the CDC to help with infection control. He went to Bomi County in Liberia, where resources were scarce.
NEIL VORA: For example, the Ebola care center, one night when I was there, ran out of gloves. How can you take care of patients with Ebola without gloves?
HUANG: Vora also helped keep track of patients and the people they'd been close to. When he returned, he ran an Ebola monitoring program in New York City. He managed a team that tracked more than 5,000 people coming from West Africa, checking in with them every day for 21 days in case they developed symptoms.
VORA: We even had the U.N. General Assembly happen in September of 2015, so we ended up monitoring major political dignitaries, former heads of state, people in very prominent positions, but they would comply with this operation as well.
HUANG: These efforts happened all over the U.S. and succeeded in keeping the risk to the U.S. public low. The 2014 epidemic killed more than 11,000 people over two years. It led to new capacity in the region, laboratories and surveillance systems built with money and help from the United States. But Frieden, the former CDC director, says times have changed.
FRIEDEN: Ebola is back, and the U.S. government spent the past year weakening our defenses. We are way less prepared than we were a year and a half ago.
HUANG: The CDC has lost thousands of employees. The U.S. has left the World Health Organization and dismantled USAID. The CDC said today that they're working around the clock and with partners in Africa to get them assistance, and they're restricting some incoming travelers from certain countries. Pien Huang, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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