Journalists Returning From Africa Not Checked For Ebola

Journalists Returning From Africa Not Checked For Ebola: CNN’s Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen told Robin Meade on HLN’s Morning Express with Robin Meade that she and her two colleagues were not asked a lot of questions when they returned from Liberia while covering the Ebola crisis.

“I expected that they were going to take my temperature, they were going to ask me lots of questions, but they didn’t.

“I said, ‘I’m a journalist, I’ve come back from Liberia, I was covering Ebola.’ And the gentleman who was helping me, the officer, he started to hand my passport back and say, ‘Welcome home,’ but instead he said, ‘Oh wait a second, I got an email about passengers like you, hold on a second.’

“And he went and conferred with someone and he didn’t know, and they conferred with someone else and in the end he said, ‘You need to watch yourself for signs of Ebola.’ And I said, ‘Well, what am I watching for?’ And he couldn’t tell me.

“Now, as if that weren’t bad enough Robin, I was traveling with two colleagues, a photojournalist and a producer, and they weren’t told anything. And they also said that they were journalists who’d been covering Ebola.

“So we were all kind of shocked and pretty horrified at the lack of screening in U.S. airports, but you know, as we’ve been talking about, that may be changing, they may be doing more to screen passengers who are coming in from west Africa.”

See original work for more on this and other stories.