Power Defends Ebola Guidelines; Praises Airlines

Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power on Friday defended federal guidelines for monitoring health workers returning from three Ebola-stricken West African countries and praised the airlines still flying there.

"Let me commend Air Brussels, Air France and Moroccan Airways for keeping their flights going. Those flights are a lifeline," Powers said at a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York hours after returning from a four-day trip to Ebola-hit Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, with a quick stop to drop her son off at school.

Power said she was considered at low risk for contracting the virus because she did enter an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea but had her temperature checked three times before boarding a plane home from Liberia and was checked again upon arriving at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

She said she believed current federal guidelines for returning healthcare workers balanced "the need to respond to the fears that this has generated" in the United States with the known science on the disease.

"We believe that when a health worker makes physical contact with a medical professional here that they can look you over, ask the questions as only healthcare practitioners know how to do, that that kind of contact combined with the temperature checks and check-ins over a 21-day period is sufficient, and that is a regimen developed on the basis of the science and on the basis of wanting to be responsive," she said, adding that health officials are capable of self monitoring.

The 21 days refers to the maximum it can take for Ebola to develop following contact with the virus.