Trump administration officials on Thursday said Americans affected by Ebola during the current outbreak in Congo will be sent to a new facility built at an airport in Kenya, instead of returning them to the U.S. The officials said that is the best option to speed up their care.
The decision is a break from past practice during previous Ebola outbreaks when Americans were brought home for care. An American doctor who treated Ebola patients during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Craig Spencer, and was treated in New York City after returning home and getting symptoms, has already said the decision to send American citizens to Kenya is equivalent to abandoning “our responsibility to ourselves.”
At this time, there is no one at the Kenya station. An American doctor who contracted the disease after treating an Ebola patient in Congo’s Ituri province, the epicenter of the outbreak, is in Berlin. One of his colleagues is in Prague, although he has no symptoms.
Administration officials said any Americans who immigrated to Kenya because of exposure to the deadly hemorrhagic fever would often be quarantined there. They will eventually be transported to Europe if they become ill.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed Wednesday in a Cabinet meeting that the United States’ borders be closed to anyone with Ebola.
“We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” Rubio said.
In a brief session on Thursday, one of the administration’s top officials, who all spoke to reporters only after agreeing not to use the names of the officials, emphasized that the decision to send the Americans to Kenya was based only on what is best for their health. “These decisions were made to ensure we provide the best possible service, to maximize what can be done for our American citizens who are overseas,” the official said.
Because the approach is a departure from previous Ebola outbreaks, it has led to pushback from doctors, public health advocates and career diplomats, who argue that the United States has more than a dozen of the world’s best Ebola treatment centers and should not deny its citizens, some of whom are responding to the outbreak, that life-saving treatment.
The American Foreign Service Association, the trade union representing professional diplomats, protested the decision Wednesday after the New York Times reported,explaining that its membersthose infected with Ebola had the “right to go home.”
A senior administration official said they were “certainly unaware of any political motives” involved in the decision. “We felt it was better to transport these people to nearby institutions, higher education institutions of higher quality, as opposed to facing a long travel time back to the United States.”
Spencer, a doctor who treated patients in Guinea in 2014 and later contracted the disease.wrote on Substackthat the administration lacked priorities. “The administration has said its first priority is to keep Ebola out of America, and its second priority is to end the outbreak in central Africa. Nowhere on that list are we asking the Americans to come forward and respond,” he wrote.
President Donald Trump has not weighed in, but during the 2014 Ebola outbreak — which as of late 2016 was the deadliest of more than 30 Ebola outbreaks since the 1970s, with more than 11,000 deaths — said the United States could not allow people infected with the virus to return.
“People going far and wide to help are great – but they have to get results!” Trumphe wrote on Twitterat that time.
So far more than 1,000 people are suspected of being infected with Ebola in the current outbreak. The widespread disorder, called Bundibugyo, is rare and there are no approved treatments or vaccines. About 250 people are thought to have already died from the virus, according to the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union’s public health agency. The outbreak is already the third largest on record and public health officials fear it had been spreading for months before it was discovered earlier this month.
Bundibugyo type experiments are difficult to find, which contributed to its late recognition. Some who work in the area also blamereduction of foreign aid by the United Statesand other rich nations.Rubio has blamedThe World Health Organization, the United Nations organization responsible for dealing with epidemics, for late infection. But Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, has pushed back, saying it is up to countries to detect and report outbreaks, not WHO.
In addition to helping Americans in the area affected by Ebola, which includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, where several people have contracted the disease, and South Sudan, which is close to Ituri State, the administration has also implemented airport screening for Americans returning from the area and prevented travel to America for people who are not American citizens, one of the officials said.
“Obviously, we want to make sure that Americans on the ground get the care they need quickly and efficiently,” the official said, “but obviously beyond that, the administration is also … taking a lot of steps to make sure that Americans in the United States don’t get sick, so these two things are not separate at all.”
The Kenyan center will be located at the US Laikipia airport, in the center of the country about 125 miles north of the capital, Nairobi. There will be 50 beds available starting Friday to quarantine Americans infected with Ebola. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, has approved the plan, a third senior administration official said, and Britain is in talks with the United States about joint access to the facility.
Thirty American health care professionals in the United States Public Health Service Deployment Force trained to be deployed around the world to stop the spread of disease will work at the center. The officers headed to Kenya, some of whom responded to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, trained for three days at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, officials said, and will continue training immediately on the ground.
“This is a very high level of oversight. We will be training an additional cadre of officers next weekend, who will be able to leave for the Kenyan base next week,” the first senior administration official said.
The United States is also shipping three quarantine units that can house people who have symptoms or have been infected with Ebola, each capable of holding four people, the official said. There will also be two biocontainment units, each capable of carrying two patients, with the aim of treating people who show symptoms or will be tested positive at the base temporarily until they can be transported to Europe for advanced care.
Where in Europe has not been determined, officials said, citing ongoing negotiations between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department and other countries, as well as a case-by-case medical decision.
“Medical professionals in Kenya will decide when transportation should be initiated, so they will do that on an individual basis, it will not be a cookie-cutter approach,” the first official said.
Officials did not have an estimate of how many Americans, if any, would need to be quarantined or seek treatment in Kenya. So far, one American doctor who has been infected with Ebola, Peter Stafford, who works with the Christian missionary group Serge, is recovering at Berlin’s Charité Hospital. His colleague Patrick LaRochelle is being monitored at Bulovka University Hospital in Prague.
A German government official told POLITICO that Germany agreed to the U.S. request to treat Stafford because of Germany’s experience in treating Ebola patients in the past and because “the flight time to Germany is very short, so the treatment can start much faster here.”
Hans von der Burchard in Berlin, Germany, contributed to this report.
