--- title: CDC Confirms First Case of Diagnosed Ebola in the U.S. description: Outbreak has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Africa canonical: https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/ author: Alexandra Sifferlin article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-09-30T21:04:10.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:00:34.707Z article:section: Health og:title: CDC Confirms First Case of Diagnosed Ebola in the U.S. og:description: Outbreak has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Africa og:url: https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: CDC Confirms First Case of Diagnosed Ebola in the U.S. twitter:description: Outbreak has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Africa twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # CDC Confirms First Case of Ebola Diagnosed in the U.S. > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola [Watch (HLS stream): Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8) (2:32)  _Published 2014-08-13. Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola_ by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Sep 30, 2014 9:04 PM UTC by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Sep 30, 2014 9:04 PM UTC Health officials confirmed Tuesday that a patient in Dallas has Ebola, marking the first such diagnosis of the deadly disease ever to occur on U.S. soil. Until now, the only cases of Ebola in the U.S. have been Americans who were infected abroad and were brought back for treatment. The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak ever, which has hit several countries in West Africa, surpassed 3,000 last week. The patient, who has not been identified, had traveled to the U.S. from Liberia, leaving Liberia on Sept. 19 and arriving in the U.S. on Sept. 20\. The patient had no symptoms when departing Liberia or when first landing in the U.S., but began developing symptoms for the deadly virus four days after arrival. On Sept. 28, the patient was placed in isolation at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. The patient’s specimens tested positive for Ebola on Tuesday afternoon. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Tom Frieden said that the medical team’s priorities are to care for the patient, as well as to track down everyone the patient came in contact with while the patient was infectious. A patient with Ebola is only contagious once an infected person starts presenting symptoms. The CDC and Dallas Health and Human Services will identify all the contacts and monitor them for 21 days, which is the incubation period for the disease. If any of the contacts comes down with a fever, they will be isolated and cared for. The CDC says it has just started the contact tracing. Frieden acknowledged that it’s possible someone with close contact with the patient could come down with the disease, but is confident the U.S. healthcare system can handle that possibility. “The bottom-line here is I have no doubt that we will control this case of Ebola so that it does not spread widely,” said Frieden during a news conference. The CDC said that they do not know how the individual was infected, but the patient must have had close contact with someone infected with the disease. The CDC is sending disease specialists to Texas. The CDC has long acknowledged that it’s possible for Ebola to reach the U.S., though concern for widespread infections is low given the quality of U.S. health care. “As long as the outbreak continues in Africa, we need to be on-guard,” Frieden said. ## Transcript This Ebola outbreak is unprecedented. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The bugs have evolved. The outbreak has gotten bigger. We are only as strong as the weakest link, and we have learned from Ebola that West Africa was a very weak link. [ MUSIC ] There's small clinics, these are like one room places where sick people might go in their house with maybe an auxiliary nurse as some one who has a little bit of medical training, but defiantly not the same standards that we would have here in the US. We're facing 3 main threats. The first is the threat of new organisms. It was coming and spreading in different places. The second is drug- resistant bacteria, and the third are intentionally created organisms. What we do in an outbreak response is continuously see how can we make it better. The exercises we've gone through both, re- evaluating our own protocols but also understanding what the public and governmental responses are has really helped us understand. How to take care of these patients in the larger context of our healthcare systems. And, those who are in the building, I would urge you to come down to either the ops team room, or the, When designing a unit that is designed to accept patients with serious communicable diseases, like Ebola, there are ways to design a unit so that it's function. Functional. Any hospital that can isolate a patient in a single patient room with a bathroom and can follow our infection control recommendations is capable of safely caring for a patient with Ebola. And we've tried to encourage every single hospital in the country to have an antibiotic stewardship program to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. There is a concern about fatigue as we go on that, the CDC other groups have sort of ramping up now to try to surge resources into the area. What we're also realizing is, we need to be able to maintain that surge for many months to keep the pressure on to completely control the outbreak. Time will tell in the next few weeks if we can start to see those numbers going in the right direction. Fewer new cases each day or each week. The single most important thing to understand about protecting Americans from Ebola is that can best be done by stopping it at the source in Africa. Its normal to be scared of something as deadly as Ebola and for the general public I really hope we can never let our fear undermine our compassion. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/"},"headline":"CDC Confirms First Case of Ebola Diagnosed in the U.S.","datePublished":"2014-09-30T21:04:10.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:00:34.707Z","description":"Outbreak has claimed more than 3,000 lives in Africa","url":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/","keywords":["ebola","Texas","CDC","Infectious Disease"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Alexandra Sifferlin","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/ebola/","name":"ebola"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/","name":"CDC Confirms First Case of Ebola Diagnosed in the U.S."}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","description":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/G194AmTC/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-13T23:41:12.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/","duration":"PT2M32S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3450540/ebola-outbreak-us-cdc/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```