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James Macharia

Kenya is closing its borders to travellers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three countries worst hit by the Ebola outbreak, the government has announced.Kenya Airways also announced that it would suspend its flights to Freetown and Monrovia when the government travel ban on passengers comes into effect on Wednesday.

Several European carriers have already suspended services to the Sierra Leonean and Liberian capitals, where states of emergency have been declared to try to slow the spread of the disease.

Kenyan Health Minister James Macharia said the measure was also aimed at travellers who have passed through the affected countries.

“In the interest of public health the government has decided to temporarily suspend entry into Kenya of passengers travelling from or through the three West African countries affected by Ebola, namely Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia,” he said.

The measure does not affect health workers fighting the epidemic, Macharia said, nor Kenyans returning home from the three countries.
However, he warned that both groups would be subject to “strict checks . . . and it may be necessary to put people in quarantine”.

The move comes amid an international appeal to help contain the deadly virus, which has already killed 1,145 people across West Africa this year.

Meanwhile, Nigeria said it had trained 800 volunteers to help in the fight against Ebola as the country’s already weak healthcare system struggled to cope with the outbreak.

Authorities in Lagos, where four people have died from the virus, last week appealed for volunteers to make up for a shortage of medical personnel because of a six-week doctors’ strike over pay.

“People have heeded our call for service”, said Hakeem Bello, a spokesman for Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola.

Experts say Ebola is raging out of control in the region, with the World Health Organisation declaring the epidemic an international health emergency and appealing for global aid.

Meanwhile, healthcare workers in Liberia have administered three doses of the rare, experimental drug ZMapp to three doctors suffering from Ebola, two medical workers in Monrovia said.

Liberia, the West African country with the highest death toll from the tropical virus at 413, received three doses of the rare serum in a special consignment this week.

Doctors Zukunis Ireland and Abraham Borbor from Liberia and Aroh Cosmos Izchukwu from Nigeria are the first Africans to receive the treatment. The drug has already been administered to two American healthcare workers and a Spanish priest, all previously working in Liberian hospitals.

The US healthcare workers’ health has since improved but the Spanish priest died.

“Three doctors are currently being administered treatment with the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp. Treatment began on Thursday evening,” said Billy Johnson, chief medical officer of John F Kennedy Medical Centre in Monrovia where two of the doctors served before contracting the deadly virus.

A second healthcare worker at the Elwa centre which is housing the sick doctors confirmed that they were on their third day of a six-day ZMapp treatment.

Details of their condition are not known.

The UN health agency said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made and this raises difficult ethical questions about who should get priority access.

The apparent improvement in the two US healthcare workers’ condition has stoked popular pressure to make the drug available to Africans — a cause advocated by the Twitter hashtag group #giveustheserum. — Al Jazeera