[Christiane Amanpour, Cnn Host:] Tonight: grilled by U.S. lawmakers on Ebola, the chief of the CDC says the virus will be a threat for a long time to come. I'll ask one of Britain's leading scientists: can anyone stop the disease? Also ahead, how did a son of Hamas end up becoming a spy for Israel? The extraordinary drama full of intrigue and betrayal.
[Amanpour:] Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour. So can anyone stop Ebola? Leaders around the world are giving that question their full attention today. The British Prime Minister David Cameron called an emergency security meeting. E.U. health ministers are gathering in Brussels and in the United States President Obama has cleared his diary and canceled travel plans for a second straight day to figure out how to stop the spread of the deadly disease after the CDC leading the charge promised and failed to stop Ebola in its tracks. And if America is having such trouble, what does it mean for everyone else? CDC director Tom Frieden was grilled on Capitol Hill today.
[Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director, Cdc:] And I will tell you, as the director of CDC, one of the things I fear about Ebola is that it could spread more widely in Africa. If this were to happen, it could become a threat to our health system and the health care we give for a long time to come.
[Amanpour:] The CDC is under fire not least for reportedly allowing a nurse who said she had a fever to travel by plan. Amber Vinson has now been transported to a specialized unit at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. She, too, had treated the patient who died in Texas last week, just like nurse Nina Pham, who now is being sent for better treatment as well in Maryland. As nurses complain that they have not been properly train to deal with this disease, President Obama has vowed to do more.
[Barack Obama, President Of The United States:] We are monitoring, supervising, overseeing in a much more aggressive way exactly what's taking place in Dallas initially and making sure that the lessons learned are then transmitted to hospitals and clinics all across the country.
[Amanpour:] So can Ebola be stopped? And is it too late to prevent it spreading even further? Joining me now in the studio is Sir Roy Anderson. He's professor of infectious disease at Imperial College here in London. He was chief scientist for the British Ministry of Defense and he's also advised the WHO and U.N. AIDS. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the program. How bad is it?
[Sir Roy Anderson, Imperial College:] Well, the situation in the three main countries affected, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, is very serious indeed. So the virus continues to spread. The doubling time of the epidemic, which is the time between the doubling in number of cases, is running at about 25-28 days. So if we have 10,000 cases today, 25 days later we're going to have 20,000. So nothing as yet that has been done is slowing the spread of this virus.
[Amanpour:] So can anything? That is the obvious next question. What can stop this spread and this disease?
[Anderson:] Well, you have very limited there are no drugs to treat patients. And there is no vaccine at the moment. So you have two options, quick isolation of the infected patient, the ill patient, and then the follow-up and quarantine of all the contacts of that patient. But this is the problem. If you now have a set of field hospitals being put in Sierra Leone and Liberia by United Kingdom and United States, the number of field hospitals is probably about 22 for the U.K., 25 for the United States. Those hospitals have got to be able to deal with and quarantine a very large number of patients. And so one's fear is that the doubling time of this epidemic is going to escalate the Western response at present.
[Amanpour:] And yet this is or is it a massive Western response. I mean, the United States has sent something like 4,000 military personnel plus doctors, plus trainers, plus equipment. Britain has done something similar and is sending more to Sierra Leone. Obviously the French are in Guinea. They are the only ones that can do this heavy lifting. Is it too late though?
[Anderson:] Well, I hope not. But I think it's going to take some time for these three countries to be able to allocate and deploy the resources that are required to slow the spread. I'm not totally convinced that these hospitals will actually slow the spread significantly. Their first task is to treat the infected or contact health care workers. So that's the first task, because these individuals are most important. Stopping spread and quarantining in the population, in these three major urban centers, is going to be very difficult indeed. And so although they may slow the spread and we need more resources to do that longer term the solutions must be either immunotherapy, which is putting serum into infected patients, and more importantly of course in the longer term a vaccine.
[Amanpour:] Well, let me ask you about that because last week on the program we spoke to Dr. Adrian Hill. He's at Oxford University. And he talked about trials being conducted right now. He thought they might take a long time, some 10 years to actually come to fruition. But what can you tell us about any advances in these vaccine trials?
[Anderson:] Well, so far there have been trials in volunteers, in United Kingdom, United States and Mali. These individuals have volunteered to receive a trial vaccine. And Dr. Fauci announced quite recently that in the United States there have been no safety worries as yet of this inoculation into these patients. So then if that continues to be good news, then the question is an international agency and regulatory authority one it is how can we speed up the process of getting this trial vaccine first of all manufactured on scale? And that's a challenge, real challenge for the companies, and then deploy it as quickly as possible? Now under the most optimistic scenario, you're talking about the first quarter to the first half of next year. And then the vaccine has to be used in the best manner possible, not only to protect health care workers, which is the primary function at the moment, but also to think about ring vaccination to slow the spread of this infection.
[Amanpour:] But are you hopeful for this vaccine? We just heard about the trial. Is can you tell us anything new about it? Is it something that you think will actually do the trick?
[Anderson:] So far, so good.
[Amanpour:] So that's good news.
[Anderson:] That is good news. But there's a long way to go and there's also very important decisions to be made by the World Health Organization and the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom about what trials would satisfy the safety and efficacy needs to get
[Amanpour:] Do we have that time?
[Anderson:] I think if people really move, these decisions could be made in weeks.
[Amanpour:] Could be done in weeks?
[Anderson:] Yes.
[Amanpour:] So this could be available in weeks, you're saying?
[Anderson:] No. I'm saying that the availability of a candidate vaccine is going to take the manufacturing process to develop thousands and
[Amanpour:] But the approval could be.
[Anderson:] The approval and what would satisfy the international community to use the vaccine if everything went well
[Amanpour:] And you're saying, frankly, that is the only way to stop the spread?
[Anderson:] Well, I think the current quarantine and isolation has to be pushed very, very hard in the most affected areas. And of it and the United States and United Kingdom and France need to step up that effort. But longer term, to prevent this infection becoming endemic, not only in West Africa but I really do fear as WHO made the comment, that this might jump to the East Coast and other cities.
[Amanpour:] Well, the East Coast of the United States, you're talking about. There are a huge number of questions and we pose that question, if the U.S. can't get a grip on this, you know, how can these other countries? And we've just talked about this a lot. Let me play you a little bit of an interview from Dr. Brantly, who was also infected, cured and then he's been giving his blood to some others in the front lines. Listen to what he said about it.
[Dr. Kent Brantly, Ebola Worker And Survivor:] I think there's a lot of irrational fear about Ebola spreading in the United States. If we think about what we've seen so far, we had one man who came from Liberia, contracted the disease there and came to America and got sick here. And now who else has gotten sick from him? It's two health care workers who were taking intimate care of him.
[Amanpour:] So is he right? Is this being blown out of proportion?
[Anderson:] Well, I think for the Western countries, United States and Western Europe, probably yes. But here's an observation. The epidemic is spreading in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea at a rate which is each primary case of infection generates two secondary cases. That's the average. The United States, two secondary cases were generate admittedly by health care workers who were caring for the very ill patient in that time. Now many of us are surprised at what has happened in Texas. But I suspect now CDC will control nationally, not just state by state, the criteria and the protocols that were required to prevent this happening.
[Amanpour:] And yet, even after the death of this man, the infection of another nurse, another nurse reporting she has a fever; she's allowed to get on a plane. Can I just play also a little bit of what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's top military official, said about the possibility
[Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs Of Staff:] If you bring two doctors who happen to have that specialty into a room, one will say, no, there's no way it'll ever become airborne. But it could mutate so it would be harder to discover.
[Amanpour:] He's caused a lot of controversy and a lot of fear with that.
[Anderson:] Well, this virus is a little bit different from the viruses that were causing sporadic epidemics way back in 2004 in the previous 40 years. The number of changes in a code which has 19,000 bits is about 300, relatively small. So my first concern is not mutation. My first concern is getting this under control. And at the moment there's no evidence to say that this is airborne droplet transmitted. However, I stress that this is a very difficult infection to study and there's no evidence to say not, that my assumption and the evidence at the moment points to contact.
[Amanpour:] Mr. Roy Anderson, thank you so much indeed for joining me tonight, clearing up some of the many, many questions and fears about this. And after a break, what if we told you the son of a founder of Hamas, the radical Palestinian organization, grew up to become one of Israel's most valuable spies? It is not the plot of a novel by John le Carre. It is a true story and it's the basis of a remarkable new documentary. We'll meet that son of Hamas and the director who brought his story out of the shadows when we come back.