Disease

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outfitted a Gulfstream jet with an isolation pod designed and built by the U.S. Defense Department, the CDC and a private company. The pod, officially called an Aeromedical Biological Containment System, is a portable, tentlike device that ensures the flight crew and others on the flight remain safe from an infectious disease.

kfor.com - by Laura Noland - August 1, 2014

ATLANTA (CNN) — When a plane took off from Georgia to meet two American missionaries fighting to survive Ebola hemorrhagic fever in West Africa, a small epidemic ignited on social media in the United States: Fear.

The medical charter flight that departed Cartersville on Thursday could bring Nancy Writebol or Dr. Kent Brantly back to a treatment facility up the street from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. . .

. . . If the plane returns with them lying in the microbial containment system erected in its bay, it will be the first known time that someone infected with Ebola has crossed into the United States.

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cdc.gov - July 31, 2014

CDC urges all US residents to avoid nonessential travel to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone because of an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola.

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices

The Centers for Disease Control plans to take measures to better protect lab workers and the rest of us from dangerous biological samples

scientificamerican.com - by Dina Fine Maron - July 17, 2014

Twenty-one dead lab chickens piled up this spring at a government facility before its researchers could pinpoint why. The team had requested and received what was meant to be a relatively harmless strain of avian flu. Instead, the virus killed all the test birds during experiments.

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MERS, also known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, has made its way to the U.S. The second patient is in Orlando, Florida while the first reported case was in Indiana.

usatoday.com - Karen Weintraub and Doug Stanglin - May 13, 2014

Another patient has turned up at an American hospital with the lethal respiratory virus MERS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today.

The agency would not identify the man but said he was a 44-year-old health care worker based in Saudi Arabia, which has been the center of the outbreak.

The man flew to the U.S. from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on May 1, to visit family in Orlando, traveling through London, Boston and Atlanta on the way.

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CDC Press Release - CDC announces second imported case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the United States