• Returning missionary staff will be confined for 21 days
• No indication that any further relief workers have been infected
• No indication that any further relief workers have been infected
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Health officials in North Carolina said on Sunday they will require missionaries and others coming home after working with people infected with Ebola in Africa to be placed in quarantine.
The quarantine is set to last for three weeks from the last exposure to someone infected in the West African Ebola outbreak, which is centred in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the officials said.
Missionaries from the North Carolina-based Christian aid groups SIM USA and Samaritan’s Purse have been working to help combat the world’s worst outbreak of the disease. Two of the relief workers, Dr Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, contracted the disease and are being cared for at Emory University hospital in Georgia.
Both have been reported to be showing signs of improvement. On Friday, Brantly wrote from hospital that he was “growing stronger every day”.
“This measure is being taken out of an abundance of caution, and it is important to remember that there are no confirmed or suspected cases of Ebola in North Carolina,” Dr Stephen Keener, medical director in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County, said in a statement.
“Quarantine is a public-health measure to protect the public that requires healthy people who were exposed to a disease to be prevented from contact with others until it is certain that they are not infected.”
The statement said the 21-day period is based on the longest duration of Ebola incubation – the delay between exposure and onset of illness. Officials said the average incubation period is eight to 10 days.
SIM USA said on Sunday some of its missionary staff based in Liberia will be returning to Charlotte, where the group is headquartered.
“We will continue to cooperate and collaborate with them and adhere strictly to their guidelines in the return of our missionaries to the United States,” a statement said.
Ebola is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids including blood, urine, faeces and saliva of an infected person, or with objects such as needles that have been contaminated. Nearly 1,000 people in West Africa have now died in the outbreak of one of the deadliest known diseases.
An official with the United Nations’ World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Sunday there have been 1,825 cases reported, with the mortality rate running at about 55% to 60%.
Speaking on the CBS programme Face the Nation, Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general for health security, said he expects the number of infections to increase.
“What is difficult in this situation is that we are dealing with countries with weak health systems,” he said. “And we are dealing with areas in which practices like good infection prevention and control practices are not the norm in some of the hospitals and in families and communities.”
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