CDC open to any suggestions on Ebola

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Sunday that his agency will consider any options to ensure Americans are protected from the deadly Ebola virus.

{mosads}Director Tom Frieden said on ABC’s “This Week” that while the agency is looking closely at suggestions “try as we might, until the outbreak is controlled in Africa, we can’t get the risk here to zero.”

“We’ll absolutely look at any suggestion that is workable and that wouldn’t backfire,” he said. “We don’t want to do something that inadvertently increases our risk by making it harder to stop the outbreak there.”

Frieden said he remains “quite confident we will not have a widespread outbreak” in the United States.

“We will stop it in its tracks,” he said.

He said the U.S. healthcare system has infection control in hospitals and formal tracking that isolates people who get symptoms.

He expressed concern that if Ebola spreads more widely to other countries throughout Africa, that will be a bigger risk to the United States.

To that end, Frieden said the U.S. response is ramping up in the region to help those countries contain the virus, he said.

In another interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” he conceded that Ebola was spreading fast enough in Africa that it was “hard to keep up.”

“The virus is moving fast but our response is moving very fast, as well,” he said on ABC.