What southern Africa is doing to keep Ebola from spreading

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — With the Ebola outbreak out of control in West Africa, health ministers from southern Africa held an emergency summit Wednesday to discuss ways of preventing the spread of the disease.

So far, this Ebola outbreak — the most severe to date — hasn’t been confirmed beyond four countries in West Africa. It began six months ago in Guinea, before spreading overland to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone.

But the death of an Ebola-infected doctor in Lagos, Nigeria, who had traveled by air from Liberia, has shown just how easily the virus can be brought to new countries. And southern Africa, with its many travel links to West Africa, is thought to be particularly vulnerable.

At the summit in Johannesburg, health ministers from the 15-country Southern African Development Community bloc agreed on measures aimed at preventing the introduction of Ebola, and mapped out strategies should the virus spread to the region.

The health ministers, joined by World Health Organization (WHO) representatives, pledged to establish a fund to assist member countries in case Ebola is detected. South Africa is to become the “center of excellence in Ebola laboratory diagnosis” for the region, the ministers said in a statement following the summit.

National health departments will strengthen surveillance for early detection of the virus, and work with civil society groups to increase awareness of Ebola, especially in poorer communities.

Ministers agreed to train community health workers in treating Ebola patients, and to identify hospitals in each of their respective countries that could handle treatment of any Ebola cases.

Ebola, an extremely deadly viral hemorrhagic fever, has killed more than 900 people since February, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Two deaths have been reported in Nigeria. A man suffering from Ebola-like symptoms and who was in the process of being tested died in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, but this case has not yet been confirmed.

The summit in Johannesburg coincided with a two-day WHO emergency meeting tasked with determining whether the Ebola outbreak is a “public health emergency of international concern.”

At Johannesburg's main OR Tambo International Airport, arriving passengers are screened with thermal scanners to detect elevated body temperatures — a fever is a possible symptom of Ebola — and the airport has a quarantine facility.

South African Airways has said it will not be canceling its flights to West Africa, unlike British Airways, which suspended its Liberia and Sierra Leone routes.

South Africa has had one previous case of imported Ebola. In 1996, a doctor who had been treating Ebola patients in Gabon traveled to Johannesburg for treatment after falling ill. He recovered, but a nurse who treated him caught the virus and died.

According to South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases, the risk of general travelers catching the Ebola virus is low, since most infections are a result of direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people.

But the institute warned that health care and aid workers may travel from infected areas to South Africa, and "a high index of suspicion is important for such cases."

"Given the frequency of travel between southern and western African countries, there is a risk of [Ebola] cases being imported into South Africa, but overall this risk is low," an update from the institute said.