As a letter writer aptly points out today, it will be interesting to know how ready our health system is for any serious eventuality in the future.
Considering that, it is interesting that the World Health Organization has warned that the deadly Ebola virus could spread to other countries and become a global crisis.
Dr Margaret Chan the head of WHO said the epidemic in West Africa was “spiralling out of control”.
She was speaking at a regional summit of the leaders of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the capital of Guinea at Conakry.
She warned if the situation continues to deteriorate, “the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives, but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries”.
While she believes the virus which has claimed 729 lives in four West African countries since February can be stopped, there needed to be a turning point in response to the outbreak. The virus, she said, had demonstrated its ability to spread via air travel contrary to what was seen in past outbreaks.
What is worrying though is the revelation that the virus was affecting “a large number of doctors, nurses and other health workers who have an essential role in curtailing the outbreak”.
She revealed that 60 health care workers had since lost their lives while helping others.
While there is concern about the potential for Ebola to spread rapidly across the globe, experts believe the risk of travellers contracting it is low because it actually requires direct contact with bodily fluids or secretions such as urine, blood, sweat or saliva. It can’t be spread through casual contact or breathing in the same air.
The outbreak first emerged in Guinea in March before spreading across borders to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
By yesterday, the deadly virus had landed on US soil for the first time when an infected American doctor returned home. Given the fact that there probably is a very low risk of the virus ever entering Fiji, one would hope though that the WHO warning has been taken on board and will be given due attention.
The onus will be on our men and women who are part of our border protection systems to be extra vigilant.
Distance could be a saviour for us when one considers the massive gap that separates us from the African continent.
But given the fact that flights are criss-crossing international air space daily carrying millions of travellers to various destinations around the globe, it will obviously pay to be vigilant and have systems in place to quickly identify and isolate such cases.
The world has become smaller in a sense and travellers will continue to converge on airports around the world to fly off to their next destination.
It will just take one carrier of this deadly virus to enter the Pacific region to turn this outbreak into a reality for us.
We need to be proactive and prepared.
