Ebola patient walks into Atlanta hospital; family will see him through glass

Atlanta (CNN) -- A medical plane bringing home one of two Americans battling the highly infectious disease Ebola is expected to arrive in Georgia on Saturday.

The arrival marks the first time an Ebola patient will be knowingly treated in the U.S.

It lands at Dobbins Air Reserve Base near Atlanta on Saturday under strict safety protocols -- before taking off again for West Africa to get the second American infected with Ebola, U.S. officials said.

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The plane is equipped to carry only one patient at a time.

Both humanitarian workers -- Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly -- will be evacuated from Liberia. It's unclear who will come first.

Dr. Bruce Ribner, who oversees the special isolation unit where they will be treated, said they are stable and 'safe to transport.'

He emphasized that precautions are in place to prevent the deadly virus from spreading, as the two undergo treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Everything that comes in and out of the unit will be controlled, he said, and it will have windows and an intercom for staff to interact with patients without being in the room.

The Emory unit was created in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is based down the road. It aims to optimize care for those with highly infectious diseases and is one of four U.S. institutions capable of providing such treatment.

Though confident, Emory has not had any experience dealing with Ebola, which the World Health Organization reports has infected more than 1,300 people and killed over 700 in recent weeks in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

No U.S. medical facility has had a known patient with the virus.

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'This particular pathogen is new to the United States,' Ribner said.

In the 1990s, an Ebola strain tied to monkeys -- Ebola-Reston -- was found in the United States, but no humans got sick from it, according to the CDC.

Fear, conspiracy theories

As the patients make their way home, the idea of purposefully bringing Ebola into the United States has rattled many nerves.

'The road to hell was paved with good intentions,' wrote one person, using the hashtag #EbolaOutbreak. 'What do we say to our kids When they get sick& die?'

On the website of conspiracy talker Alex Jones, who has long purported the CDC could unleash a pandemic and the government would react by instituting authoritarian rule, the news was a feast of fodder.

'Feds would exercise draconian emergency powers if Ebola hits U.S.,' a headline read on infowars.com.

Ribner repeatedly downplayed the risk for anyone who will be in contact with Brantly or Writebol.

'We have two individuals who are critically ill, and we feel that we owe them the right to receive the best medical care,' Ribner said.

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For all the concerns about the United States, it's nothing compared to the harsh reality in the hardest-hit areas.

Even in the best-case scenario, it could take three to six months to stem the epidemic in West Africa, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC.

This is 'an unprecedented outbreak accompanied by unprecedented challenges,' said Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization.

Chan noted that the virus is moving over porous borders, by plane. It has gone into rural areas where it's hard to get adequate treatment, as well as crowded cities where it can spread more easily.

'This outbreak is moving faster than our efforts to control it,' she said. If things keep getting worse, it could kill many more people could die, disrupt societies and economies and spread to other countries.

There's no vaccine, though one is in the works.

There's no standardized treatment for the disease either; the most common approach is to support organ functions and keep up bodily fluids such as blood and water long enough for the body to fight off the infection.

The National Institutes of Health plans to begin testing an experimental Ebola vaccine in people as early as September. Tests on primates have been successful.

So far, the outbreak has been confined to West Africa. Although infections are dropping in Guinea, they are on the rise in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

CNN's Barbara Starr contributed to this report.