Mozambique has reinforced routine checks, not set up Ebola screening checkpoints – MISAU

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique has reinforced routine checks, not set up Ebola screening checkpoints – MISAU

2:20 CAT | 08 Aug 2019

Picture: A Verdade

The Ministry of Health denied on Wednesday (August 7) that it had set up Ebola virus checkpoints on Mozambique’s border with Malawi. “We have reinforced routine activities, not at the Malawi border in particular but at the largest posts of possible entry for people from the Democratic Republic of Congo,” National Director of Public Health Rosa Marlene said, clarifying: “There is no Ebola at this time in Malawi.”

Marlene explained that no new fixed screening checkpoints had been created for the lethal virus that has been taking lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo for about a year now. “We have not yet reached the stage of implementing a contingency plan because we have no Ebola,” she told a press conference in Maputo City, explaining that checkpoints for screening are set “only in cases of active surveillance.”

Checks on countries visited are routinely carried out and, “if eventually someone comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, we have to know this,” said the National Health Dirctor. “Given that Ebola is not part of routine screening then, in this routine, we are educating ourselves to also include this vigilance – but it does not mean setting up something,” she added.

“According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) classification for our country we have very low risk. We have no border contact with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only region considered of high risk, so when we talk about a red risk it is not for the Republic of Mozambique, it is only for the areas where the Ebola epidemic is occurring,” she further clarified, adding: “Ebola was never a public health problem [in Mozambique]”.

The Mozambican authorities’ position is supported by WHO country representative Djamila Cabral, who says that her institution “considers that the only country which has Ebola cases is the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ebola cases found in other countries are from the Democratic Republic of Congo and not from those countries.”

Cabral clarified that the risk of Ebola being transmitted to Mozambique “is low but it is not zero, as it is not zero anywhere in the world.”

“I want to reiterate that there are no cases of Ebola in either Malawi or Mozambique. All that has been done are measures to be prepared if we have to be, because the risk is not zero for any country in the world,” Cabral concluded, adding that 2,687 cases of Ebola had been recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the year to last Tuesday (August 6), of which 1,811 had proved fatal.

By Adérito Caldeira

Source: A Verdade