Amid an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the US is set to make it mandatory for air passengers entering the country to furnish an attestation saying they have not been to the DRC in the last 21 days.
Reuters reported it first citing a memo from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that they accessed. Nigeria and Kenya have also been affected. The report says that the new CDC rule will take effect starting November 3. The Ebola outbreak in DRC has killed more than 4,000 people out of over 9,000 confirmed cases in the country.
“It’s preposterous to suggest that just because someone was holidaying in Uganda, which by the way has no cases of Ebola, is reason enough to drag us into a conversation about Ebola in Nigeria,” and Ugandan government spokesman told AFP. Nigeria said on Tuesday that the active case in the country was imported from Uganda, sparking outbreak fears in Uganda.
The law was extended to also include US citizens in July.
WHO regional director Mohamed Janabi described it as a “more complex outbreak landscape” than what the continent has seen before.
When the Ebola outbreak first started earlier this year, the CDC in May made a rule that prohibited entry of passengers into the US if they had been to the DRC in the last three weeks.
