New Orleans, Louisiana – Health workers have been strayed away from the medical conference currently held in New Orleans after the Ebola warning wherein attendees who are potentially exposed to the epidemic are to be quarantined upon their arrival.
One of those that were blocked from attending the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene conference is Amanda Tiffany, an epidemiologist who came from a Liberia urgent care clinic. She missed a very important annual assembly that discussed threat of quarantine because of the fear that she’ll be automatically quarantine by the time she arrives in New Orleans.
According to Carrie Teicher, a doctor with the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders, it was unfortunate that her coworker Tiffany was not able to travel to the conference because of the fear of being quarantined in one of the urgent care near me when she arrives at the venue. Teicher added that Amanda Tiffany hopes that the regulations imposed by the federal government will be quickly changed though.
Those health workers who intend to attend the conference that will be held in New Orleans and will run from November 2 to November 6 are expected to go over 4,000. They were sent a letter by the Department of Health and Hospitals of Louisiana last week that warned them to stay away in case they’ve been in one of the Ebola-ravaged countries like Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone within the past 21 days. The warning also goes for those health workers who’ve had a contact with an Ebola patient in one of the urgent care clinics in West Africa before going home.
The Louisiana Health Department said in a statement that there isn’t any use traveling to New Orleans to attend the annual American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene conference and end up just being confined in one’s room.
The organizers of the conference stated that they don’t support the rules mandated by the federal government of Louisiana saying that the urgent care quarantine policy is outside of the scientific understanding of how Ebola is transmitted from one person to another.
State Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican who have already expressed his intent of running for the 2016 presidential elections, is one of those government officials who call for travel ban from Ebola-ravaged countries to the U.S.
The group Doctors Without Borders say that the mandatory quarantining issued by the health officials of Louisiana as well as the other states of the country for nurses and doctors going back to the U.S. from West Africa have created an alarming effect on aid work in the Ebola affected countries.
The outbreak has already killed almost 5,000 people mostly from the three West Africa nations while more and more health workers are coming forward to volunteer help for Ebola patients.
