The US government plans to begin taking the temperatures of travellers from West Africa arriving at five US airports as part of a stepped-up response to the Ebola epidemic.
President Barack Obama says the new efforts will provide yet another tier of protection at key US points of entry.
"These measures are really just belt-and-suspenders - it's an added layer of protection on top of the procedures already in place at several airports," Obama told state and local officials in a teleconference call Wednesday.
However, the focus is still on stopping the epidemic in West Africa, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, said in Atlanta.
"As long as Ebola continues to spread in Africa, we can't make the risk zero, here," he said.
At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest said the additional layer of screening would begin at New York's JFK International and the international airports in Newark, Washington Dulles, Chicago and Atlanta.
He says the new steps will include taking temperatures and will begin on Saturday at JFK.
Frieden says temperatures will be taken with a device that will avoid direct contact with the travellers.
Obama says the new measures also will include more screening questions for passengers arriving from the countries worst hit by the outbreak - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
He says the procedures will allow US officials to isolate, evaluate and monitor travellers and collect any information about their contacts.
Earnest says the five airports cover the destinations of 94 per cent of the people who travel to the US from the three heavily hit countries in West Africa - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
He estimates about 150 people will be checked a day under the new procedures.
A Liberian man who had come to the US with Ebola died on Wednesday.
Forty-two-year-old Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed in the US with the disease, had come to Dallas in late September but did not display obvious signs of having Ebola when he entered the US.
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