Govt should act on SCH suggestion for Ebola travel curbs
The warning issued by Qatar’s Supreme Council of Health (SCH) against travel to the four Ebola-affected countries has come at the right time.
The SCH decision follows a declaration from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that the outbreak of the often-fatal disease in West Africa is a “public health emergency of international concern”.
Since the onset earlier this year, the virus is believed to have infected 1,779 people, killing 961 according to the latest figures released by WHO, which described the current Ebola outbreak as the worst  in the four-decade history of tracking the disease.
Guinea has closed its border with neighbouring Sierra Leone, the epicentre of the outbreak, from where the deadly and virulent Ebola virus has advanced to Liberia and Nigeria. Other West African governments are attempting to contain the disease’s spread.
It is an undisputed fact that given the extensive reach of air travel, no country can remain isolated these days. As part of the precautions for keeping Qatar safe from Ebola, the government should immediately implement the SCH recommendation to restrict travel to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria until further notice.
The SCH should also start, without any delay,  medical screening on people arriving from these countries. As of Saturday, the Hamad International Airport did not have any arrangements to do that. Screening has to be implemented at the land border too with immediate effect.
At least until the Ebola outbreak is contained, it would be ideal that all airports across the world adopt the same measures which were taken to tackle the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in 2002 and 2003.
The Zambian government has banned arrivals of people from countries where there has been an Ebola outbreak as a preventative measure to stop the virus from entering the country.
Nigeria and Liberia have both declared a state of national emergency in an effort to control the unprecedented epidemic. Canadian health officials announced on Saturday that a patient who recently travelled to Nigeria is being tested for Ebola.
Ebola has no cure although potential medications and vaccines are in various states of development.  Two infected American missionary workers were recently given an experimental drug, ZMapp, which seems to have saved their lives.
The WHO says it was not involved in the decision to treat the patients who had to give consent to receive the drug, knowing it had never been tested in humans before.
The process by which the medication was made available to the American patients may have fallen under the US Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” regulation, which allows access to investigational drugs outside clinical trials.
An effective Ebola drug could help doctors treat the deadly virus which is killing about 60% of the people infected in West Africa. But a vaccine would be a much more effective tool in stopping this, and future, epidemics.
Considering that only small amounts of ZMapp are available now, a suggestion from Harriet A Washington, a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, seems to make sense.
As soon as it can be made in quantity, the drug for Ebola should be made available to Africans in all the regions that are threatened by the epidemic, regardless of ability to pay.