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28 March 2024

Concerns mount over US Ebola quarantine

Residents wait for the bus in the Clifton neighborhood of Staten Island in New York October 25. Home to a community known as "Little Liberia" due having the largest concentration of Liberians outside Africa, the neighborhood of Clifton is now fighting against the stigma of Ebola after renewed worries and political concern over the case of Dr. Craig Spencer, the fourth person to be diagnosed with the illness in the United States and the first in the country's largest city. (Reuters)

Published
By AFP

A controversial decision to impose Ebola quarantines in three US states sparked criticism on Sunday it will discourage badly needed health workers from volunteering in the crisis in West Africa.

More than 4,900 people have died in the worst ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic virus, most in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Strict new rules in New York, New Jersey and Illinois requires a three-week quarantine for anyone exposed to the disease, because symptoms can develop any time within that period after exposure.

But health authorities say this measure is unnecessarily strict and could be counterproductive.

"The best way to protect us is to stop (the outbreak) in Africa, and one of the best ways to stop it in Africa is to get health workers who are going there and helping them with their problem," National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci told CNN Sunday.

But "when they come back, they need to be treated in a way that doesn't disincentivise them from going there", he said, speaking on CNN's State of the Union talk show.

Fauci stressed that the scientific evidence "tells us people who are not ill, who don't have symptoms, with whom you don't come into contact with body fluids, they are not a threat, they are not going to spread it".

But New Jersey Governor Chris Christie defended his state's mandatory quarantine, calling it necessary "to protect the public health of the people of New Jersey."

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Christie said: "I think this is a policy that will become a national policy sooner rather than later."

He rejected arguments it would discourage health workers from traveling to the most impacted zone to help, saying "I believe that folks who want to take that step, willing to volunteer, also understand it's in their interests and the public health interests to have a 21-day" quarantine.

New York, New Jersey and Illinois ordered the mandatory measure on Friday.

New Jersey has already isolated a nurse who arrived at Newark with a recent history of treating patients with Ebola in West Africa, but who has tested negative for the virus.

'Haphazard and not well thought out'


Kaci Hickox, in an account in the Dallas Morning News, complained she was made to feel "like a criminal" and said she was "scared for those who will follow me."

"I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganisation, fear and, most frightening, quarantine."

US envoy to the United Nations Samantha Power has also expressed concern the new quarantine policies were "haphazard and not well thought out".

"We cannot take measures here that are going to impact our ability to flood the zone" with health workers, Power said Sunday during a stop in Guinea.

Fauci said Sunday, on ABC This Week: "As a scientist and as a health person, if I were asked, I would not have recommended" the quarantine.

He emphasised it is possible to monitor at-risk people by having "somebody taking your temperature, asking you if you have symptoms."

"There's a big, big difference between completely confining somebody that they can't even get outside and doing the appropriate monitoring based on scientific evidence," he said on CNN, insisting "our first goal is to protect the American people."

So far there have been nine cases of Ebola in the United States, most among health workers who volunteered in Africa, with only one death.

In the most recent case, the first in New York, doctor Craig Spencer, 33, tested positive a week after returning from Guinea.

Although he was monitoring for symptoms, he spent the days prior to falling ill moving around the city, including riding the subway and going bowling the night before he developed a fever, raising public fears he could have infected others.

But health authorities have said the risk is extremely low.

Ebola is spread though close contact with the sweat, vomit, blood or other bodily fluids of an infected person.