Canada's Ebola Quarantine Impacting Humanitarian Response

"To me, we're not stepping up in the way that we should be as a country that does have the ability to do it and changing the quarantine regulations is a low-stakes way of being able to do it."

"All the decisions that the Canadian government has decided to make over the past few months around the Ebola outbreak, none of them have been very forthright in saying, we understand that this is a global priority and as Canada we're going to step up to help in the ways that are equal to the capacities that we have in this country."

Lily-Madeleine Seguin, public health promotion advisor, Oxfam global team 

 

"[The government is] continually reviewing the measures alongside the latest evidence with international partners and will determine next steps before the existing measures are set to expire."

"[The temporary measures are not intended to eliminate all risk,] but to reduce the likelihood of importation [of Ebola], support early identification of potentially ill travellers, and therefore reduce the risk of potential spread to others in Canada." 

Karine LeBlanc, Health Canada communications adviser

Lily-Madeleine Seguin, public health promotion adviser woth Oxfam. The Canadian Press

 

Travellers returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo or from Uganda are advised by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to self-monitor for symptoms and only if they had a high risk exposure like direct contact with bodily fluid of an infected person, or close, face-to-face contact with someone coughing, vomiting or bleeding who has the virus, should they quarantine.

 

"I'm very critical about how Canada chose to implement their public health measures", commented Mylene Ratelle, hired as a health promotion manager at Doctors Without Borders who would have remained for longer in the DRC had she not needed to quarantine for three weeks at her Montreal apartment prior to the start of the fall semester, as a professor of public health. She faulted the lack of scientific basis for strict border measures enacted by Canada.

 

People who have been in casual contact with Ebola patients are not generally candidates to contract the disease. It is through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood, vomit and semen that spreads the virus. The Canadian government's mandatory 21-day quarantine set to expire, has been condemned by many humanitarian aid workers. The measures had been announced in May at the time of the FIFA World Cup which had strict rules for co-hosting countries. 

 

At the time, Canada's minister of health stated "It's not a question of science", but rather that of protecting people from the lasting trauma of past outbreaks when people from around the world converge en masse at such world events. Doctors Without Borders were critical of the measures that resulted in a dozen Canadians identified with valuable expertise cancelling their assignments as a result of the quarantine measures. MSF's Ebola response in the DRC had twenty-three Canadians in all, taking part. 

 

The Globe and Mail

 

"To me, it's quite egregious", said Roojin Habibi, research director of global health law at the  Global Strategy Lab, University of Ottawa and York University. The travel restrictions, she held, ignore expert guidance from the World Health Organization which stated that blanket travel restrictions are based not on science, but fear.

 

Canadian humanitarian aid workers are also concerned that an extension of the expiring regulations affecting Canadians and permanent residents of Canada returning from the DRC, Uganda or South Sudan could be detrimental to the response of the outbreak with their ability to respond stifled by the long quarantine period. This outbreak has been identified by the World Health Organization as the swiftest growing Ebola outbreak in history, as well as the deadliest. Africa's public health agency has reported over 2,500 deaths from over 5,000 infections.

 

Aid workers are also critical of the $8 million committed by the current Liberal government in support of the fight against the outbreak, particularly compared to the Conservative-led government's response in 2014 of $110 million related to financial assistance given by Canada to West Africa during that country's Ebola outbreak. 

 

The Globe and Mail