Seven Americans quarantining at Kenya Ebola facility after US travel ban, says aid group | US news
Seven American aid workers in Congo to fight the Ebola outbreak are being quarantined at a new isolation facility in Kenya after the US government imposed travel restrictions, the head of a US aid agency that employs them told Reuters.
The aid workers are the first people known to have been quarantined at the facility, which is at the center of a legal case in Kenya that sparked huge opposition and in which a court ordered the work to be suspended. But construction continued, according to U.S. officials and satellite images reviewed by Reuters.
Washington’s new policy says American citizens returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak occurred, must spend three weeks in a third country before entering the United States.
The U.S. government is building a 50-bed bio-isolation unit at an air force base in central Kenya for asymptomatic Americans exposed to the virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda. Many Kenyans are outraged by what they see as the United States eliminating the health risk posed by such patients.
Last month, Kenya’s “minister of health” announced that construction of the facility would be halted immediately after he was found in contempt of court for failing to comply with an order to stop work pending final decision.
“Samaritan’s Purse has seven American Disaster Assistance Response Team personnel,” Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, told Reuters in response to questions.
“None of them have any symptoms, but they are being quarantined for 21 days by the Kenyan government,” Graham said.
A US state department official told Reuters that a group of asymptomatic Americans on the front lines of the Ebola response were “voluntarily transported to the Kenyan facility for precautionary monitoring and isolation.”
“Kenyan authorities allowed these individuals into the facility under the supervision of U.S. public health service clinicians,” the official said, adding that the decision was made “absolutely out of an abundance of caution.”
Kenyan health ministry officials did not immediately respond to calls or requests for comment on the move. A senior Kenyan foreign ministry official said they had no information about this.
Another source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named, said the group arrived in central Kenya on Monday and slept on military cots in tents.
Some treated Ebola patients at the Christian aid group’s treatment centers in Congo, he said, but others did work such as construction without direct contact with patients.
“There is a potential high-risk exposure,” he said, adding that their health was being monitored. He added that Kenyan authorities did not allow the group to leave the facility to travel elsewhere in the country.
The often fatal viral disease is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from infected people or animals.
Samaritan’s Purse, which was promised several million dollars from the Trump administration to fight Ebola, is an evangelical Christian group working in disaster areas around the world.
One of the largest foreign aid groups treating Ebola in Congo and the group with the largest number of Americans there is working closely with the World Health Organization to contain the outbreak. One of the US employees who contracted Ebola earlier this month was transferred to a hospital in Germany on Monday.
