Two days after Ebola was discovered to have been diagnosed in a Texas man, a Missouri doctor showed up at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Thursday to protest the mismanagement of federal health authorities in handling the crisis of the disease, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Dr. Gil Mobley, a microbiologist and emergency trauma physician from Springfield, Mo., checked in and cleared airport security while donning a hood mask, goggles, gloves, boots and space suit coveralls with "CDC is Lying" written on the back. But once he arrived at the gate to board his Delta flight, authorities asked him to remove all of his protective gear.
"They gave me the option of confiscating my equipment or not flying," said Mobley, a Medical College of Georgia graduate.
Two days ago, a Texas man made headlines for being diagnosed with Ebola after he came back from Liberia. While Liberian officials are planning to prosecute him for lying on an airport questionnaire about having no contact with a person infected with Ebola, a CDC team reportedly screened him properly at the airport in Monrovia, Liberia, before he flew in to Texas, according to USA Today.
"There were no signs of any disease when the gentleman boarded the flight," said Dr. Tom Kenyon, director of the CDC's Center for Global Health. "This was not a failure of the screening process at the airport."
But Mobley has now targeted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accusing it of sugarcoating the risk of Ebola in the United States.
"If they're not lying, they are grossly incompetent," said Mobley. "For them to say last week that the likelihood of importing an Ebola case was extremely small was a real bad call."
"With 10,000 people flying out of West Africa daily, it's only a matter of time until all corners of the world are exposed. Once this disease consumes every third world country, as surely it will, because they lack the same basic infrastructure as Sierra Leone and Liberia, at that point, we will be importing clusters of Ebola on a daily basis," Mobley predicted. "That will overwhelm any advanced country's ability to contain the clusters in isolation and quarantine. That spells bad news."
Recounting his experience of flying from Guatemala to Atlanta on Wednesday, Mobley slammed the CDC for not being precautious enough of the threat.
"Yesterday, I came through international customs at the Atlanta airport," the doctor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The only question they asked arriving passengers is if they had tobacco or alcohol."
"The CDC is asleep at the wheel," Mobley said. "It's going to be bad, and I want to make sure that this conversation is happening before this gets out of control in the United States."
Ebola, not an airborne virus, can be transmitted when a person comes into direct contact with the blood or other bodily fluids, including sweat, of a person who is sick from the virus, USA Today reported.
