The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent an urgent appeal to its own workforce, asking employees to volunteer for Ebola screening duty at three major U.S. airports as the deadly outbreak in Central Africa accelerates beyond the capacity of international responders to contain it.
Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya issued the internal request, confirmed as authentic by a Department of Health and Human Services official, ABC News reported. The email sought personnel across multiple job series and pay grades, a sign the agency is casting a wide net to fill screening posts at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas.
The staffing call comes days after the CDC temporarily barred entry for non-U.S. citizen travelers who visited the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan within the previous 21 days. The restriction extends to lawful permanent residents, green card holders, a measure that underscores how seriously the administration is treating the threat. U.S. passport holders returning from those three countries must now funnel through Dulles for screening and an exposure interview.
Enhanced screening at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta began Saturday morning. The New York Post reported that Houston's Bush Airport started accepting screened passengers after 10:59 p.m. Houston time on Tuesday, making it the third and final designated entry point. Those three airports are now the only authorized gateways for passengers arriving from the affected African nations.
At each location, CDC staff will observe arriving passengers for visible signs of illness, check temperatures for fever, and refer anyone showing symptoms for further medical assessment. The process mirrors, and in some ways exceeds, protocols used during earlier Ebola crises, when the federal government faced sharp criticism for slow or porous screening.
The CDC's invocation of Title 42 authority to suspend entry from Ebola-hit nations marked a significant escalation in the federal response, one that previous administrations resisted under political pressure.
The numbers from Central Africa explain the urgency. The International Rescue Committee issued a watchlist flash alert warning that the outbreak is running ahead of containment efforts, with over 900 suspected cases and at least 223 deaths reported across the DRC and Uganda.
IRC officials painted a grim picture. Bob Kitchen, the organization's vice president of emergencies, said:
"The warning signs are flashing red. Increased conflict and cuts to global aid funding have dismantled defenses at exactly the wrong moment. The lesson from every previous outbreak is clear: delays cost lives. The risks are growing and the resources are shrinking; that is the brutal arithmetic facing global aid today."
Cases have now reached Goma, a major city in the DRC's eastern North Kivu province, and Kampala, Uganda's capital, both significant regional transport hubs. That geographic spread is precisely the kind of development that turns a contained rural outbreak into an international crisis.
The World Health Organization classified the outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern, one level below a pandemic in the UN alert system. WHO assessed the national risk as "very high," the regional risk as "high," and the global risk as "low", though that last category could shift fast if cases keep reaching cities with international air links.
The WHO's emergency declaration triggered a broader scramble among governments worldwide to shore up border protections.
This outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which WHO says has carried a case fatality rate of 30 to 50 percent in previous outbreaks. Healthcare workers in the DRC have fallen ill due to a lack of personal protective equipment, a failure that compounds the crisis at its source.
Roughly two-thirds of suspected cases are women and girls, a disproportion the IRC flagged in calling for special protective measures. Heather Kerr, the IRC's DRC country director, framed the challenge bluntly:
"Every delay has a human cost. Eastern DRC's years of conflict and displacement have left health systems on their knees, and that makes containing this outbreak all the harder."
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged the severity in a Monday briefing but insisted the virus can be stopped.
"We are facing an extremely serious and difficult outbreak. It will get worse before it gets better. But we know this virus, and we know how to stop it. We have stopped every previous Ebola outbreak, and we will stop this one, too."
He added a harder edge: "The question is just how quickly we can do it, and how many more lives will be lost before we do."
The deadliest Ebola outbreak on record struck West Africa between 2014 and 2016, producing more than 28,600 cases and killing at least 11,325 people by June 2016. A subsequent outbreak in eastern DRC from 2018 to 2020 claimed 2,299 lives. The current crisis already threatens to rival those catastrophes if containment fails.
During the 2014 crisis, nearly 30 countries enacted travel bans or restrictions on travelers from affected West African nations. The Obama administration at the time resisted a full ban, ordering screening at five airports instead while citing concerns about economic impact on the affected countries. That reluctance drew bipartisan criticism after two American nurses contracted the virus, including one who flew commercially after reporting a low-grade fever to the CDC, which cleared her because its guidelines only restricted travel at 100.4 degrees or higher.
The current administration moved faster. The travel restrictions announced last week go further than screening alone, barring non-citizens and green card holders outright. That is the kind of decisive action that the 2014 response conspicuously lacked.
The risks of half-measures were demonstrated again recently when an Air France flight was diverted to Montreal after a passenger boarded in violation of the Ebola travel ban, a reminder that enforcement gaps at foreign departure points can undermine even strong U.S. entry controls.
Several details remain unclear. The full text of Bhattacharya's email has not been released, and neither the CDC nor HHS has disclosed how many personnel are expected to deploy to the three airports. No Ebola cases in the United States have been reported as of the article's publication date, but the screening infrastructure is plainly being built on the assumption that the threat is real and growing.
It is also unclear why South Sudan was included in the travel restriction alongside the DRC and Uganda, where confirmed cases have been documented. Whether that reflects intelligence about unreported cases or a precautionary buffer around the outbreak zone has not been explained publicly.
The CDC's broader emergency posture has been active on multiple fronts. The agency recently activated emergency response protocols for a separate hantavirus outbreak involving cruise ship passengers monitored across five states, a reminder of how thin federal public health resources can stretch when multiple threats emerge simultaneously.
The administration deserves credit for acting before the virus reached American soil rather than after. Barring entry for non-citizens from affected countries, funneling returning Americans through a single screening airport, and mobilizing CDC staff for frontline duty are exactly the kinds of aggressive, common-sense measures that protect the homeland.
But an urgent volunteer call to fill screening posts at three airports raises a fair question about whether years of bureaucratic bloat and mission drift at federal health agencies left the CDC short of the operational capacity it needs when a real crisis hits. An agency with a budget measured in billions should not have to pass the hat among its own employees to staff an airport checkpoint.
The IRC's Bob Kitchen put it plainly: "Delays cost lives." That is as true at Dulles and Hartsfield-Jackson as it is in Goma and Kampala. The federal government moved quickly on the policy. Now it needs to match that speed with the manpower to enforce it, before the next flight lands.
