Dr Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Sunday the American doctor who contracted Ebola in West Africa seemed to have improved.

Dr Frieden, who was making media appearances in an effort to reassure a public worried by press reports and speculation over the West African outbreak, the worst ever, told NBC’s Meet the Press talk show it was encouraging to see Dr Kent Brantly walk out of an ambulance unassisted when he arrived at Atlanta’s Emory University hospital from Liberia on Saturday.

“Ebola can be deadly,” he said, “but for people who are healthy like this doctor, the fatality rate may be lower than those usually quoted.”

Asked if enough precautions had been taken, and if Brantly’s return represented an unacceptable risk to the US, Frieden said: “He was coming home, and the organisation that sent him to Africa made the decision to bring him home.

“He’s an American citizen, and what our role is in public health is to make sure that if an American is coming home with an infectious disease we protect so it doesn’t spread. That was what we did in transit and at the hospital.”

Brantly, from Texas, is the first of two US aid workers to be flown back to the country; Nancy Writebol, a missionary from South Carolina who worked for the same charity in Liberia, Samaritan’s Purse, is due to follow on the same specially adapted private jet.

Liberia’s information minister said on Sunday Writebol would arrive back in the US early on Tuesday. Lewis Brown said the second evacuation flight was expected to leave West Africa between at 1am and 1.30am that day.

The Ebola outbreak has so far mainly affected three West African countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. More than 700 people have died; the disease has also been reported in Nigeria.



“What we’re doing at CDC is surging our response,” said Frieden on Sunday. “We are going to put at least 50 public health experts in this region in the next 30 days because actually we do know how to stop Ebola.”

Frieden said old-fashioned practices were required to stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa. That meant finding the patients and their contacts, making sure they were treated, educating the public and doing rigorous infection control in hospitals.

Ebola is not an airborne disease, and is only spread through direct contact with bodily fluids.

On Saturday, Brantly was driven to the hospital from a military airbase in an ambulance escorted by police. He stepped down from the ambulance in full protective clothing – another figure in such clothing led him into the building. Brantly is now being cared for in an advanced isolation ward.

An ambulance arrives with Ebola victim Dr Kent Brantly, right, to Emory University hospital on Saturday. Photograph: AP

The same day, Frieden said the CDC had received “nasty emails” and at least 100 calls from people questioning why the sick aid workers should be let into the US. The Associated Press interviewed members of the public around the Atlanta hospital. One such interviewee, Ashley Wheeler, said: “I just think it’s a blessing that we can help possibly make the infected person’s life a little more tolerable.

“If I were that person I would want my country to help me the best way they could.”

Brantly’s wife, Amber, issued a statement in which she said: “It was a relief to welcome Kent home today. I spoke with him, and he is glad to be back in the US. I am thankful to God for his safe transport and for giving him the strength to walk into the hospital.”