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)