The Obama Administration announced Friday the appointment of an Ebola "czar."  The "czar' Ron Klain, former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Viden, will report to national security advisor, Susan Rice, and homeland security liaison, Lisa Monaco. President Obama has been under pressure to have someone oversee health security in the United States, and to help stem the outbreak in three African countries, according to The Associated Press.

The first American nurse infected with the Ebola virus, Nina Pham, 26, was flown from Dallas to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland on Thursday.  She is in "fair" condition, according to the federal health officials. Pham is believed to have contracted the virus while caring for an infected patient,Thomas Duncan from Liberia, who died last week. The second nurse, Amber Vinson, 29, is being treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

A North Carolina drug maker, Chimerix, plans to start testing its experimental antiviral drug in patients with Ebola after it received authorization from Food and Drug Administration regulators. 

The Center for Disease control said Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms appear, and it is not spread through the air like flu. People have to be in direct contract with a sick person's bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit, to contract the disease.

The World Health Organization admitted they botched efforts to stop the Ebola outbreak in the three African countries -- Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- in an internal document obtained by the Associated Press.  The U.N. agency blames incompetent staff, a lack of information and "nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall." The report said the broken health systems and porous borders would have prevented traditional containment methods from working. The report also admitted breakdowns in communication between Geneva and the WHO regional director in Africa.

The House of Representatives took a break from the campaign trail ahead of the mid-term elections to hold a congressional hearing on Thursday on Capitol Hill about Ebola. Committee members were seeking answers to concerns raised by their constituents over Ebola, and the view that the Obama administration wasn't responding aggressively enough.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the CDC, defended the government's response. "There's zero doubt in my mind that barring a mutation which changes it -- which we don't think is likely -- there will not be a large outbreak in the U.S.," Frieden told members of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "We know how to control Ebola, even in this period."

House Republicans demanded a travel ban from the three African countries most affected -- Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

"People are scared," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the panel's chairman. "People's lives are at stake, and the response so far has been unacceptable."

Frieden said there are 100 to 150 people arriving daily in the U.S. from the three Ebola-striken African countries. Ninety four percent of them come through the major airports where screenings are already being conducted. Frieden said if travel was banned in those countries, people would take alternative routes and make tracking and screening even harder.