Dr. Craig Spencer

This would have been hard to manage with these case counts and this disease itself in ideal conditions, and the eastern part of Congo is anything but ideal.

I've worked many times in this part of DR Congo.

Transport is tough, logistics are hard.

In addition, you have the conflict that is pervasive and omnipresent, and that makes it that much harder to access certain places, certain healthcare structures, and certain institutions.

And it's going to be really hard for us to want to tackle this outbreak as quickly as possible.

But we need to recognize, as we have learned in every other outbreak, that we need to work with communities as opposed to against them.

Otherwise, we're setting ourselves up for even more trouble, even more challenges and more of a prolonged outbreak.

I think it's a moral abdication of what our country owes its own.

The people that we are going to be sending and demanding, essentially, go and help with the response, either part of the CDC or a public health service, or maybe even perhaps our military.

These folks are then going to be treated in a structure which I have a hard time believing can provide the quality of care that we are currently able to provide in a network of specialized hospitals all across the U.S.

that we have built up for this reason over the past decade at an immense amount of cost, an immense amount of work by really dedicated professionals.

And I think the fact that we are not going to, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said,

allow any single case of Ebola into the U.S.

is a fixation on the wrong goal and the wrong priority.

Our priority needs to be helping in the outbreak in Congo, and that is the only way to prevent cases from showing up in the region, in the U.S.

and in other places.

It's the only way.

The road ahead is going to be really, really difficult.

I look for those lights of optimism, but I'm also faced with the

few months and longer are going to look like and it's going to be really tough.