US president said world leaders need to marshal extra finances and personnel to ‘bend the curve of the epidemic’ in west Africa

Barack Obama has warned of Ebola spreading globally if more is not done to stop the epidemic raging out of control in west Africa, as he urged the US public not to lose sight of the importance of focusing on tackling the disease at its source.

As pressure grows on the White House to explain failures to prevent a second case of transmission within the US, the president announced a “rapid response Swat team” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would aim to respond to any further infections within 24 hours “to take local hospitals step by step through what needs to be done”.

The president also cancelled a trip to Rhode Island and New York on Thursday to focus on his administration’s response to domestic cases of Ebola, the White House said late on Wednesday.

“I am absolutely confident that we can prevent a serious outbreak of the disease here in the United States, but it becomes more difficult to do so if this epidemic of Ebola rages out of control in west Africa. If it does, then it will spread globally in an age of frequent travel and the kind of constant interactions that people have across borders,” he told reporters after an emergency two-hour meeting of his cabinet.



The administration is under growing political pressure over its handling of the crisis after the CDC admitted “shortcomings” in its initial response to the first confirmed US case in Dallas, admitting it should have done more to ensure the hospital was following infection-control protocols. An infection of a second health worker was confirmed on Wednesday.



On Wednesday, Obama stressed that though protecting healthcare workers was a top priority, the risks of transmission should not be overstated:



“I want to use myself as an example so people have a sense of the science here. I shook hands with, hugged and kissed – not the doctors – but a couple of the nurses at Emory because of the valiant work that they did in treating one of the patients. They followed the protocols, they knew what they were doing and I felt perfectly safe doing so. This is not a situation like the flu where the risks of a rapid spread of the disease are imminent.”

Earlier, the president declared Ebola a “threat to international security” in a video conference with European leaders.



Speaking with leaders in the UK, France, Germany and Italy shortly after the case was confirmed on Wednesday, the US president said they all urgently needed to marshal extra finances and personnel to “bend the curve of the epidemic” in west Africa.



But the White House rejected growing calls for greater restrictions on passengers travelling from the region, insisting travel bans were “not on the table” at present and would prove counter-productive by hampering local aid efforts.



The House speaker, John Boehner, urged the president to review that policy on Wednesday. “A temporary ban on travel to the United States from countries afflicted with the virus is something that the president should absolutely consider along with any other appropriate actions as doubts about the security of our air travel systems grow,” he said.

The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, resisted calls for a single “Ebola czar” to be placed in charge of the federal response on Wednesday, claiming “people should be encouraged that the government is demonstrating a tenacious adaptive response [to Ebola]” among a range of federal agencies.



“We have designated very clear lines of responsibility in terms of which agencies are responsible for which aspects of this response,” he added.

Nonetheless, political criticism is expected to grow on Thursday when a committee of the House of Representatives convenes the first public hearing into recent developments.

Republican Tim Murphy, chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee, said “so far traveller self-reported screening procedures and hospital infection control measures have been demonstrated failures” in a statement issued ahead of Thursday’s testimony from the CDC director, Tom Frieden.

White House officials acknowledge failures in the initial response and said a “very concerned” Obama had cancelled travel plans and convened an urgent meeting with cabinet members on Wednesday to make sure federal agencies were properly coordinated.

“It is unacceptable that even one healthcare worker was exposed to this virus while they were providing medical treatment to this patient. So that is an indication that there were shortcomings,” Earnest told reporters in a White House press briefing dominated by the crisis.

However, he rejected suggestions that the multiple transmissions among health workers in Dallas constituted an “outbreak” of the disease, insisting that the risk of the disease spreading in the general public in the US remained “extremely unlikely”.

In Texas, officials were preparing to transfer the second nurse diagnosed with Ebola to a special bio-containment unit in Atlanta, hours after it was revealed that she had travelled on a commercial flight to Ohio with a low-grade temperature before she was diagnosed.