While the barrier of 4,000 Ebola deaths has just been crossed, several American airports are establishing checks on the arrival of passengers to detect potential patients.
Marisol Touraine announced last Friday, France is mobilized and ready to manage the Ebola epidemic, if cases were to be declared in the country. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States are also putting in place a plan of attack, and have just introduced a new measure to prevent the spread of the virus on their territory: a control at airports of returning passengers. countries affected by the epidemic.
On departure and arrival
A strategy that Marisol Touraine is also considering. However, the Minister of Health had previously excluded it. She also said Thursday that checking travelers on arrival was not the silver bullet.
However, she announced on Friday that Paris would finally think about it, while recalling that the important thing was border control at the start. To avoid the spread on French territory, the control on arrival “Seems simple and a common sense measure, although everyone considers that what is essential is the control at the start.t ”.
Strict process
New York’s JFK airport is the first in the United States to implement this type of control. The airports of Chicago, Atlanta, Washington and Newark must follow suit in the days to come. Passengers returning from Guinea, Sierra Leone or Liberia will have to comply with a strict process, including taking their temperature and filling out a questionnaire. If a traveler says they have been in contact with a sick person or if they have any of the symptoms, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) will step in and offer additional testing. The UK has also announced that similar controls will be adopted at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports and at St Pancras station, which hosts Eurostars trains.
However, since the incubation time of the virus can reach three weeks, it is possible that no symptoms will be detected at airports. Thus, in the case of Thomas Duncan, the American who died of the virus on Wednesday in Dallas, the controls would not have changed anything, since his symptoms did not appear until a week after his return. However, it should be remembered that people are not contagious until the first symptoms appear.
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