Health officials are racing to contain a rapidly expanding outbreak of a rare strain of Ebola in Central Africa.

The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency over the weekend.

So far, at least 116 suspected deaths and more than 300 other cases have been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring Uganda.

Today the CDC confirmed at least one American has contracted the disease, a medical missionary

who had been working in a hospital in the DRC.

That country's health minister pleaded with residents to visit new government treatment centers

if they had symptoms.

This is not a mystical disease.

Make yourself known.

Make yourself known so that you can be taken care of and so that we can prevent the disease

from spreading.

For more, we're joined now by Dr. Craig Spencer.

He's an associate professor of public health and emergency medicine at Brown University.

He also contracted Ebola himself while working as a physician in West Africa during a 2014 outbreak.

Dr. Spencer, welcome back to the NewsHour. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me on to talk about this.

So on top of all this other news today, the U.S. announced an entry ban for non-citizens who've been in the DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan in the last three weeks.

Let me just ask you, what concerns you most about this outbreak, given what we know right now?

What concerns me most is that we learned way too much, way too quickly for this to be anything but really bad.

I am concerned about the next few weeks and the next few months.

We have found ourselves weeks, maybe months behind when this first started spreading.

Over the last year, we've lost a lot of the response capacity, particularly here in the U.S.

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