Like a storm about to break, yesterday’s news about a ship carrying a possible Ebola case deeply shocked the country.
What has been talked about so often in the past weeks as something happening ‘out there’, in deepest Africa, now becomes threateningly near.
Other countries in the West have already been through this – the Spanish priest who was airlifted back to Spain (and died), the American missionary who was airlifted to the only facility in the US that could handle him (and lived), etc.
But we just do not have the specialised units to treat Ebola. And our country is far too densely populated to allow even the slightest chance of such a disease entering the country.
The government was quite correct in banning the ship from entering the Maltese waters and/or transferring the sick crewman to the Maltese hospital. We just cannot handle not even one single case.
But there is more.
In most people’s minds, the risk of Ebola infection has become linked to all sorts of infections that can enter the country through the massive influx of people coming here. Many immediately think of asylum seekers but there are other streams of people entering the country with little or no checks and controls.
Our forefathers in different times created the quarantine institution which, as its name implies, used to oblige travellers from countries with diseases to spend 40 days in seclusion so that any eventual disease surfaces then rather than when these people are free to roam the country.
It was a harsh regime, no doubt, and Byron’s angry words at being cooped up are well known. But it served its purpose even though the country had to endure at least two bouts of plague from the sixteenth century onwards.
There are undoubtedly some system of prevention and preventive measures enforced by the Health Department but perhaps we need to raise a higher protective wall given the uncontrolled influx of so many people and the ever-increasing risks of infections coming from all over the world.
The principle of quarantine, that people coming from countries with less than adequate health systems, lack of proper inoculations, must be kept separate until they prove to be clean must be brought back, if need be.
Maybe it will be objected that the enclosed regime practised by the closed centres operates on these lines, but it would seem we need to spend more and to make such regime stricter. The inmates of the closed centres are taken to health centres, to hospital, mix freely with Maltese citizens many times without adequate protection.
We are playing with fire and we know that. It only takes one case to bring a deadly disease in our midst and this will have incalculable consequences here. It is true our population have high standards of hygiene which is the basic defence against the spread of disease but all the hygiene in the world will not be enough if and when faced with the deadly diseases such as Ebola.
Being over-careful with regards to health never killed anyone.