White House: Progress in Our Ebola Response at Home and Abroad
In a White House Press Statement Wednesday:
Produced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under a very-high magnification, this digitally-colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) depicts a single filamentous Ebola virus particle that had budded from the surface of a VERO cell of the African green monkey kidney epithelial cell line.
Today, approximately 10 months since the first U.S. personnel deployed to West Africa to fight Ebola, we mark important milestones in our response to the epidemic and chart the way ahead. In keeping with the President's charge that we tackle Ebola as a national security priority, we built, coordinated, and led an international response-involving thousands of personnel, both U.S. and international, civilian, and military-to fight the disease at its source. All the while, we enhanced our preparedness to encounter Ebola on our shores, establishing comprehensive measures to screen and detect the disease in travelers, while strengthening our capacity to diagnose, isolate, and treat any patients safely. This response showcased American leadership at its finest on the world stage, just as we came together as a nation to fortify our domestic resilience in the face of understandable apprehension. To be sure, our tasks are far from complete; we will keep working to meet this challenge until there are zero cases in West Africa and our domestic infrastructure is fully completed. Our focus now turns to consolidating that substantial progress as America today marks the next phase of our response.
As we mark this transition, today President Obama will host at the White House some of those responsible for these substantial gains. In preparation for this event, Ron Klain, the outgoing Ebola Response Coordinator, provided the President with a comprehensive update on our progress. As he told the President, Americans should be proud of what we, together as a nation, have accomplished, even as we must not lose sight of the challenges that remain and the urgent tasks ahead.
Read the rest of the White House statement HERE