Trump Administration Plans to Send Citizens With Ebola Exposure to Kenya
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In what one emergency physician and public health expert called “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own,” the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Americans with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola to a facility in Kenya, instead of repatriating them and treating them in the state-of-the-art quarantine and treatment facilities the U.S. has for dangerous diseases that pose a threat to public health.
The facility is currently being set up, The New York Times reported, and several dozen Public Health Service officers — whose agency operates under the Department of Defense — are training to deploy to Kenya. The PHS also deployed to Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“This is unbelievable and infuriating,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, a professor of public health at Brown University.
According to the Times, the PHS officers in Kenya were initially going to monitor any Americans, such as healthcare workers who have gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to help contain the outbreak that was declared a public health emergency of international concern earlier this month. Those who showed symptoms would be transferred to European hospitals; at least seven Americans have been sent to facilities in Germany and the Czech Republic in recent weeks.
But two people familiar with the plans told the Times that the administration now plans to see to the patients’ treatment in the Kanya facility as well.
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“When Americans will need us most — especially those who go abroad to help end this outbreak at its source — the U.S. government plans to send them to a hospital it is standing up from scratch in Kenya,” wrote Spencer on Substack on Tuesday. “I find it incredibly difficult to believe that we can stand up a facility in the next few weeks — or even months — with the staff, the supplies, and the experience we’ve built over the past decade in more than a dozen hospitals across the U.S.”
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, who helped treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone in 2014, said the plan does not make sense “from a preparedness, operational, or ethical standpoint.”
“How are public health officers going to take care of persons who get sick?” said Kuppalli. “These are not persons........
