The American aid workers’ current predicament is a result of the U.S’s new travel restrictions, which state that American citizens returning from regions that experienced an Ebola outbreak must spend three weeks in a third country before reentering the US.
Consequently, the aid workers have been mandated to undergo quarantine at Kenya’s newly established and controversial isolation facility.
“Samaritan’s Purse has seven American Disaster Assistance Response Team staff members there,” Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, told Reuters in response to questions.
“None of them have any symptoms, but they are being quarantined by the Kenyan government for 21 days,” Graham said.
Per the Reuters exclusive, a U.S. State Department official revealed that a group of Americans who had participated in the Ebola response but were asymptomatic had “voluntarily moved to the Kenya facility for precautionary monitoring and isolation.”
“Kenyan authorities have authorized their movement into the facility under the observation of the U.S. Public Health Service clinicians,” the official said, adding that the decision was taken “strictly out of an abundance of caution.”
According to another source who asked to remain anonymous, the American aid workers went to the site in Kenya on Monday and were sleeping in army cots in tents.
He stated that while certain individuals had been employed in construction or other capacities that did not entail direct contact with infected persons, others had provided medical treatment to Ebola patients within the care facilities managed by the Christian charitable organization in the Congo.
“There is one potential high-risk exposure,” he said, adding that their health was being monitored.
Kenya’s controversial Ebola center
A couple of weeks back, Donald Trump’s administration was reportedly looking for $800 million in emergency funding for the Ebola quarantine facility in Kenya, even as the project remains stalled by court orders and mounting opposition within the East African country.
The financing proposal, which was filed with Congress as part of a larger $1.4 billion Ebola response package, demonstrates Washington’s intention to position Kenya as a crucial center in attempts to limit what experts say might be the biggest Ebola outbreak in recent history.
Prior to that, Kenya’s health minister ordered an immediate halt to the building of the US-backed Ebola facility after being convicted in contempt of court following a lengthy legal battle over its development.
The quarantine facility, which is meant to improve regional readiness for infectious disease outbreaks, has been met with significant opposition from activists, attorneys, and local communities, who claim that officials neglected to fully engage impacted individuals before construction began.
Critics have also expressed concerns about environmental protections, public health dangers, and openness in the project’s approval process.
The controversy has turned what was once billed as a public health effort into one of Kenya’s most controversial foreign-funded infrastructure projects.
