The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, will begin deploying rapid response teams to hospitals around the United States that admit Ebola patients, the nation's top health official said.
CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters, late on Tuesday, that the teams will arrive at their destination "within hours" if someone is suspected to have Ebola.
"I wish we had put a team like this on the ground the day the first patient was diagnosed. That might have prevented infection," Frieden admitted. "We will do that from today onward with any case in the US." He added the CDC should have had a "more robust management team and been more hands on from day one," with an "even larger team on the ground immediately." Frieden said such action would have prevented 26-year-old nurse Nina Pham from contracting the disease at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where she was infected by Thomas Eric Duncan, a man from Liberia who was the first diagnosed Ebola patient in the US.
Duncan passed away last week, but Pham, in a statement released Tuesday, said she was doing well and feeling better.
At a meeting with Pentagon officials earlier in the day, President Barack Obama said he is "surging resources into Dallas" to find out exactly how Pham caught the virus.
He also gave assurances the US has "the public health infrastructure and systems and support that make an epidemic here highly unlikely, but obviously, one case is too many, and we've got to keep on doing everything we can, particularly to protect our health care workers, because they're on the front lines in battling this disease.
"What happens in West Africa has an impact here in the United States and in all the other countries that are represented here," he concluded.