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The President Is Responsible For Safeguarding And Protecting Americans

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President Obama, as a Commander-in-Chief, is responsible for safeguarding and protecting Americans, their interests (whether in the United States or abroad), and foreign nationals in the United States (US). Thus, the president is accountable to the American people and the international communities to provide leadership during crises to assure the well-being of American citizens. Consequently, the recent Ebola epidemic developing in West Africa presented the president and his administration with a unique challenge and an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership capacity. Despite this opportunity, the Obama administration has failed in its duty to effectively manage the crisis and minimize Americans’ exposure to the virus. Ebola is …show more content…

While Ebola is not an airborne virus, it can be transmitted through direct contact with an infected person’s fluids, such as blood, urine, vomit, sweat, semen and sexual contact (Nevins, 2014). With these deadly symptoms and ease of transmission, the Ebola virus can quickly wipe out an entire community. Yet, scientists have found that the severity of the disease in humans varies widely, from rapid fatality to mild illness or even asymptomatic response, further complicating the ability to quickly identify infected patients and reduce the possibility of transmission (Kolata, 2014). Moreover, the virus has different strains and mutates according to the specific environmental conditions in which it exists (Peters et al., 1991). Although Ebola caught the world’s attention during the 1995 outbreak in Zaire, the first outbreak occurred in 1976. As the chart below displays, 71% of the people infected died as a result of Ebola during this first outbreak (Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 56 (2): 247-270, 1978). With the current outbreak, this ratio has dramatically decreased as a result of scientific research leading to early detection, but the current infected population is more than 20 times the amount of any previous outbreak and this number continues to grow as no vaccine exists to prevent the disease.
Given the severity of the disease and the growing scale of the infected population, pressure to provide assistance increased on the Obama

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