US to screen travelers from Mali for Ebola

Mali is not suffering widespread Ebola illnesses. But federal officials are growing increasingly worried about a new cluster of seven illnesses in Mali that have left health public health workers scrambling to track and monitor at least 450 other people who may have had contact with the seven people and may be at risk.

“At this point we can’t be confident that every exposed person has been identified, or that every identified person is being monitored daily,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Starting Monday, anyone arriving in the U.S. from Mali will undergo the same screening procedures that were ordered last month for travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. That includes taking arriving travelers’ temperatures, and questioning them about their health and possible exposure to the Ebola virus. They also will be asked to provide contact information and to agree to – for 21 days – have daily communications with local health officials who will be asking them to take their temperatures twice each day and monitoring them to see if they develop symptoms.

Ebola is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick people, and caregivers and health workers have borne the brunt of the crisis. Protocol calls for those who have been exposed to be isolated and monitored for symptoms for up to 21 days.

West Africa is currently suffering the worst Ebola epidemic in world history, with at least 14,000 illnesses and more than 5,100 deaths so far. Nearly all of the cases have been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. About 75 people arrive from those three countries each day, on average. They are funneled through five airports – two in New York and one each in Washington, Chicago and Atlanta.

In contrast, only about 15 to 20 passengers arrive from Mali to the United States on an average day. The majority arrives through the same five airports. But in the next few days, steps will be taken to make sure all funnel through those airports, Frieden said.

The CDC is quickly expanding its staffing in Mali, with at least four people there as of Sunday and about a dozen expected to be in place within the next couple of days, CDC officials said.

Mali’s Ebola current outbreak centers around the Pasteur Clinic in the capital city of Bamako, where a man who arrived from Guinea died in late October and a nurse who treated him died.

Health officials there are now trying to track down not only family and friends who visited 70-year-old man at his hospital bed but also the scores of people who prepared his body for burial and attended his funeral. Teams of investigators are also headed to the border community where authorities believe he first fell ill.

"The future of Ebola in Mali will depend on the quality of the surveillance of these contacts. If they are rigorously followed, and any subsequent cases are quickly identified and isolated, the battle will be won. But if there are failures in the process, it will lead to further contamination and further problems," said Ibrahima-Soce Fall, Mali's WHO representative.

Mali’s first confirmed case of Ebola was a child from Guinea who died in October in the Malian town of Kayes, which is about 375 miles from the capital of Bamako. Those who had contact with the child have been identified and traced, according to Health Minister Ousmane Kone.

Al Jazeera and wire services