You just brought this up a few days ago lyra00. It was a student who brought ebola to Senegal.
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2014/08/29/senegal-confirms-its-1st-case-of-ebola
Yes I did Yoda - and this event from Senegal perfectly illustrates why I am viewing the next couple of months with dread.
For reasons I cannot fathom, time and again people seem to totally ignore all of the public health messages, all of the government announcements and exhortations and just behave in a crazy fashion.
This student WAS in contact with Ebola (knowingly from the sound of it) but instead of staying put under medical care where he was, chose to travel to another country and not seek medical aid for a day. So now there is a chance that the poor doctor he consulted will follow the same sad path as the two doctors in Nigeria who ended up dying purely for providing care to a patient who neglected to tell them they had been in contact with Ebola, thus denying them the knowledge to enable them to protect themselves.
This is from a BBC website article on the subject:
The Guinean student sought treatment at a hospital in Senegal's capital Dakar on Tuesday, but did not tell staff he had had contact with Ebola patients in his own country.
On Wednesday, the Guinean health services reported "the disappearance of a person infected with Ebola who reportedly travelled to Senegal," according to Senegal's health minister.
She said the missing person was quickly identified as the Guinean student and he was immediately quarantined.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28983554
I read an article saying that a number of US universities were planning to screen students from the relevant countries on arrival. This is OK if they coincidentally start to show symptoms at that point, but theoretically they could have up to 19 or 20 more days to develop symptoms.
I worry that we in the west are being too complacent - I would be wanting to send over as much protective equipment and expertise as possible to try and get control of this outbreak before the virus mutates to become more easily transmissible, because when that happens we could be in a scenario quite as terrifying as any Stephen King novel. I find it appalling that medical staff are having to make their own PPE by cutting holes in plastic sheeting because there are not enough hoods. In some areas they do not even have gloves - how on earth can we expect the spread to stop under those conditions?
The WHO is asking for increased support as part of their plan, but I do wonder whether we should be looking at getting medieval/following the African traditional way of dealing with haemorrhagic fevers in addition to the WHO plan. The only effective way to stop an outbreak at the moment is isolation of cases.
Whilst I can sort of see that stopping people crossing land borders could be very difficult, I do wonder whether we should just say "To hell with the effect on business, we are going to ban all international and intercontinental air travel to and from West Africa (apart from humanitarian flights) for a period of two months at which point we will review numbers of cases and deaths and decide whether to continue the ban or resume commercial air travel". Otherwise I am not sure we can reasonably expect to halt the spread - and once a handful of infected but non symptomatic young people make it out to assorted universities around the world, the horse may well have bolted, depending on exactly how the virus has mutated by then.
We absolutely have to do both though - isolation plus hugely increased manpower and equipment into West Africa - we cannot just close the borders and leave the people in the affected countries to live or die - because the virus will continue to mutate and we need to stop that process before it mutates into a form which can be passed on more easily.
I wonder whether we will look back in a few months and really, really regret the fact that we let profit and business considerations be prioritised ahead of public health.
