Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams
A day after US officials said Kenya had approved a request to open a quarantine center for Americans exposed to a rare strain of the Ebola virus, a court in the East African nation on Friday temporarily blocked the plan amid a growing outbreak in neighboring Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The High Court prohibited the Kenyan government from establishing or operating any Ebola exposure, quarantine, isolation, or treatment facility in the country under any agreement with the United States or any other foreign government or agency.
The court also blocked Kenya’s government from allowing anyone infected with or exposed to Ebola into the country pending the outcome of the case, which was filed by the Katiba Institute, a civil rights group.
“At its core, the case is about preserving constitutional accountability, protecting public health, and ensuring that no government may place expediency above the lives and safety of the people of Kenya,” Katiba Institute executive director Nora Mbagathi said Thursday.
A 50-bed Ebola quarantine center was set to open Friday at Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki, located approximately 125 miles north of Nairobi. The facility would have been operated by members of the US Public Health Service, a uniformed branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday during a Cabinet meeting that “we cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States.”
However, US public health officials strongly criticized the plan to quarantine Americans in Kenya instead of repatriating them, with one emergency physician accusing the Trump administration of “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own.”
Elected leaders in Laikipia County welcomed the High Court’s ruling. They had opposed the US quarantine center, and had asked in a joint statement prior to the decision, “Why Laikipia?”
“What does the US government know about this that they are not accepting their own affected citizens into their soil but are ready to have them elsewhere?”
The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists, and Dentists Union (KMPDU), which had strongly opposed the quarantine center and had threatened to strike, also welcomed the High Court ruling.
“We are utterly disgusted by the government’s apparent willingness to trade national biosecurity and the lives of its citizens for foreign aid,” KMPDU secretary general Davji Bhimji Attelah said in a statement Thursday, referring to the $13.5 million the Trump administration pledged for Ebola preparedness in Kenya, part of a broader $125 million US commitment toward fighting the disease.
“We will not sit back and watch Kenya be treated as a containment colony for a lethal pathogen that we did not generate,” Attelah added. “We will not tolerate an apartheid healthcare model on Kenyan soil. If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya.”
Critics say President Donald Trump’s ideologically driven decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), his administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, and reduced funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global public health efforts have adversely affected the response to the current Ebola epidemic, compared with 2014 and 2019 outbreaks.
The WHO said Friday that there were a total of 906 suspected Ebola cases and 223 suspected deaths reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as of Wednesday, and 125 confirmed cases in the DRC and 9 in Uganda, with 18 deaths among the confirmed cases in both countries.
Ebola—which typically kills between 25% and 90% of infected people, depending upon the strain of the virus and quality of available medical care—causes widespread and often catastrophic damage to the body’s blood vessels, immune system, and organs. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals, including fruit bats, porcupines, and non-human primates, and then spreads between humans through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of infected people.