European Union: EU health commissioner Tonio Borg : Ebola

The EU needs to both double its efforts to fight the deadly virus Ebola in West Africa, inclunding introduce entry screening for airline passengers to enable identification of infected passengers, Health Commissioner Tonio Borg says.

Together with Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, today (16 October), Borg is hosting a high-level conference in Brussels to discuss Ebola. The outbreak of the virus involves four nations - Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria, and is expected to last a lot of months. But Europe has by presently witnessed its initial deadly cases.

Before this week, Germany reported that an evacuated UN nurse had died in Leipzig next receiving medical treatment in an isolation unit. Meanwhile, a Spanish nurse is as well being treated next having caught Ebola from a patient who died in Madrid in August.

Borg told EU health ministers that while he believes the Europe should redouble its efforts to assist the African nations, the 28 member bloc as well needs to ensure that laboratories, hospitals and public health services are ready to entirely protect citizens and stop Ebola from spreading if and at the same time as it arrives in Europe.

But other measures need to be put in place as well.

The United States has introduced additional screening measures in five International airports for travellers arriving from the affected nations, but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has stated that screenings, from a scientific point of view, would have limited effectiveness.

"For me however, as European Commissioner for Health, each person with the virus we detect through screening is one life saved; potentially a lot of lives saved," Borg said. "Each person we can treat and cure because we could detect this person through entry screening justifies considering entry screening," he added.

The Health Commissioner stressed that while its up to individual member states to decide how they wish to guard their boarders against Ebola, and that the EU tries to reduce barriers for the movement of people and goods, EU lawmakers as well need to recognise the role that setting up borders can play in protecting public health.

>> Read: EU looks for volunteers to fight Ebola in West Africa

Experts have stated that “exit screening” of outgoing airline passengers will be one of the majority effective instruments to prevent Ebola from spreading.

However, exit screening cannot be considered an absolute guarantee that the disease will not be exported as the incubation period for Ebola is 21 days. Therefore, it’s possible that the symptoms appear later and the disease is transmissible only at the same time as the symptoms are manifest.

On Wednesday (15 October) the UN's Ebola mission chief Anthony Banbury told the UN Security Council that Ebola "is winning the race".

"If we do not get ahead of the crisis, if we do not reach our targets and the number of people with Ebola rises dramatically as some have predicted, the plan we have is not scalable to the size of such a new crisis," he said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says 4,447 people have died from the outbreak and its new projections suggest the infection rate could reach 5,000 to 10,000 new cases a week within two months if world efforts to combat the spread of infection are not stepped up.