‘No need to quarantine travelers from Ebola-hit countries’

MANILA, Philippines - Travelers from Ebola-hit countries in West Africa need not be quarantined as it is not in accordance with the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).

That’s the stand of the of the Philippine Society for Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (PSMID).

Speaking to reporters, Mari Rose delos Reyes, PSMID secretary, said WHO and CDC guidelines provide for other factors to be considered for mandatory quarantine, aside from travel history to Ebola-hit countries.

“I would like to emphasize that asymptomatic patients do not transmit the virus, do not transmit the infection so we don’t need to quarantine everybody coming from areas that are having widespread transmission,” she said.

Delos Reyes, also Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) medical department head, said other factors to be considered are “contact and the symptoms that they have.”

The CDC had also released the standards for assessing travelers from affected areas based on possible “high risk, some risk, low risk and no risk” factors, she added.

PSMID president Ludovico Jurao Jr. said that not all people coming from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea should be considered carriers of the virus.

“Our recommendation is all based on what is being proposed by WHO and CDC,” he said. “But whatever the DOH is doing now, we are going to help them. We will provide them with expertise, knowledge and advice.”

Department of Health (DOH) spokesman Lyndon Lee Suy said they are implementing mandatory quarantine to make sure that the Ebola virus will not enter the country.

“It is not that we are disregarding their recommendation but we want to make sure that Ebola will not sneak into our country,” he said.

“It’s simply because we want to strictly monitor cases and I don’t think there is something wrong about it.”

The DOH just “leveled up” its precautionary measures to combat Ebola, Lee Suy said.

As of Nov. 21, Ebola had infected 15,351 people in eight countries, and 5,459 had already died, WHO records showed.

Liberia accounted for 7,082 cases, followed by Guinea with 2,047, Sierra Leone 6,190, Nigeria 20; Mali six, US four, and Senegal and Spain, one each.