Ebola spread in the US, EU ‘surprised’ Nasim

Ebola spread in the US and a European country has deepened Bangladesh’s worries about the fatal virus.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 16 Oct 2014, 03:52 PM
Updated : 16 Oct 2014, 05:58 PM

Health Minister Mohammed Nasim on Thursday said he had ordered foolproof measures to prevent the virus from entering the country.

“I’ll also visit the airport today,” he told journalists after attending a seminar on leprosy in Dhaka.

File Photo

The minister said he was surprised to learn the virus had made it to the US and an EU country.
“How the infection spread to those countries despite their sophisticated health system surprises me,” he said.
He said the government had kept up screening at ports and would set up thermal scanners at international airports to record the body temperatures of arriving passengers.
Fever is one of the symptoms of Ebola infection that prompt doctors to make further investigations, though WHO has suggested exit screening at all ports only for affected countries.
The current Ebola outbreak that WHO termed an international health emergency is the worst outbreak on record and has killed 4,447 people so far, mostly in West Africa's Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
The first case was reported in Guinea in March.
But travel restrictions on infected people and the absence of direct air links with the affected countries made the chances of the deadly virus reaching Bangladesh “a remote possibility”.
However, after the US announced its first case recently, it drew much global media attention, including in Bangladesh.
Spain has also recorded a case.
Bangladesh media reported that expatriates returning from affected Liberia passed through the Dhaka airport without any screening.
The government later tracked them down and found that they came via two more countries and flew to Dhaka from Algeria.
However, director of the national disease monitoring arm, IEDCR, Prof Mahmudur Rahman told bdnews24.com on Thursday that they kept those passengers on monitoring card.
“They remained healthy,” he said.
IEDCR's principal scientific officer Dr M Mushtuq Husain ruled out any chance of possible Ebola infection to a family in Khulna that returned on Aug 12 from Nigeria, an affected country.
“We have monitored them during this long period,” he said. The incubation period of the virus ranges from two to 21 days only.
Given the very high mortality rate, doctors say it would be very difficult for a person to carry the virus from one country to another.
The risk of infection was also very low since person‐to‐person transmission results from direct contact with body fluids or secretions of an infected patient.
The US health workers who were contracted the infection were nursing a patient at a Dallas hospital.
Ebola, mainly an animal disease, was first reported in Congo in 1976. The disease got the name after a river in that country.
WHO blamed weak health systems in the currently affected West Africa countries, lacking in human, financial and material resources at the time of categorising Ebola as an international emergency.