The president recommended that CDC be given more authority and resources to carry out this mission. We sent a team of people over there. At first, first the blood samples were sent to Belgium. But it was determined, because of the possibility of the virus being Ebola, that CDC probably was the only place where they could be safely handled and quickly diagnosed. They were sent to us and we made the diagnosis within one day or so that it was Ebola very similar to the Ebola of 1976.
Early detection is critical in the control of emerging infectious diseases.
I can give you an example. The E. coli 0157- H7, which recently affected Japan, comes from eating under cooked ground beef. We had an outbreak in this country in 1993 in which about 500 people were infected at a restaurant in the Pacific Northwest. A few children died. We now know that outbreaks occurred in various parts of the country in the early 1980s but were not immediately recognized.