RI won't bar travelers from Zaire despite Ebola
RI won't bar travelers from Zaire despite Ebola
JAKARTA (JP): A senior health official said yesterday that Indonesia would not impose quarantine restrictions or bar travelers from Zaire, despite global panic over the spread of the fatal Ebola virus in the African country.
Ministry of Health Director General for Contagious Disease Control and Environmental Health Hadi M. Abednego told reporters yesterday that Indonesia was following the World Health Organization's advice that countries refrain from imposing quarantine measures.
"The disease is restricted to Zaire and has been contained," Hadi said, echoing the rationale provided by the WHO.
WHO chief representative in Indonesia Robert J. Kim-Farley told The Jakarta Post yesterday that the UN agency approved of screening and close surveillance of people who may be infected with the Ebola virus.
It was reasonable to impose only loose measures in respect of the Ebola disease, he said, because although a high mortality rate was associated with the disease, those infected died quickly and the disease did not spread rapidly.
"People can be infected after exposure to the illness within two to 21 days, with an average of one week. Usually they die on the ninth day," he said in a telephone interview.
Kim-Farley said that, unlike diseases with a "window period" during which a virus-carrier showed no signs of illness, the Ebola virus could only be transmitted when a person had become debilitated by the disease.
"The virus will not spread during the incubation period. Thus, a person can only transmit it when he is sick," he said.
Although, theoretically, a person could undertake air travel during the short incubation period and subsequently pass on the disease, such an occurrence was unlikely, Kim-Farley said.
"The people in Zaire who have the illness are not the kind who are likely to travel. Even if they did, they would usually be too weak to even board a plane and therefore would not be able to get very far," he said.
The Ebola virus, which was discovered in Uganda in 1967 and has no known cure or vaccine as yet, killed hundreds of people in an epidemic in northern Africa in 1976.
The virus, which takes the lives of 90 percent of the people who contract it, is transmitted by blood, bodily fluids and secretions.
Many of those who have died from the disease are health officers and other people attending to virus-carriers who have failed to observe appropriate precautions, such as using rubber gloves, masks and wearing protective clothing.
WHO headquarters in Geneva reported on Wednesday that the number of people infected with the Ebola virus in Kikwit, Zaire, had risen to 101. The number of people who have died in this latest outbreak of the disease remains at 77, but WHO officials predict that the number will rise over the next few days.
The Directorate General for Immigration, which would implement any ban or quarantine procedures decreed by the Ministry of Health, said earlier this week that the 1992 Immigration Law permitted Indonesia to ban any person or group of persons who might spread contagious disease in the country.
The directorate's chief spokesman, Haryo Subayu, said his agency had not received any instructions from the health authorities regarding Ebola. (pwn)