TORONTO – Putting asymptomatic health-care workers into quarantine upon their return from Ebola-affected countries is not “good science,” Ontario’s health minister said Monday.
Eric Hoskins, who is a medical doctor with infectious disease experience in Africa and a PhD in public health, said he doesn’t agree with measures that are being taken in New York and New Jersey.
“I disagree with the premise that quarantine of health workers who are asymptomatic upon return – I don’t believe that that’s good science and I think it actually discourages health-care workers from going to West Africa, which is how we’re going to solve this epidemic,” he said after question period Monday.
“This is a disincentive to them.”
The governors of New York and New Jersey have been at odds with scientists over Ebola in ordering mandatory 21-day quarantines for medical workers returning from West Africa, even if they show no signs of the deadly disease.
A New Jersey nurse, who was the first person forced into a mandatory quarantine in the state, had protested being kept in a tent for two days and was talking about suing. The state Health Department said in a statement Monday that Kaci Hickox was to be released and taken to Maine, where she lives.
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The state-imposed quarantines were announced after Dr. Craig Spencer returned to his New York City apartment after treating Ebola victims in Guinea. Before he was hospitalized with a fever, he rode the subway, went bowling and ate at a restaurant.
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath spoke in favour of the quarantines, stressing the need to be “proactive.”
“From my perspective, better safe than sorry,” she said.
“If we can find the ways to make sure that anybody who has the potential of having had exposure, because there’s the time frame, the incubation time frame, I think we need to be really serious about that. If being overcautious saves somebody from Canada, from Ontario, from contracting this virus, then I say let’s be overcautious.”
NDP health critic France Gelinas called on the Liberal government to provide paramedics with proper training and equipment to prepare for Ebola.
“Why was this government prepared to put our front-line health-care workers in harm’s way without doing everything possible to keep them safe?” she asked the health minister during question period.
Hoskins said he has set up a minister’s advisory group of front-line health workers, including paramedics, and their first meeting was last week. A directive will be issued “shortly,” he said later.
The ministry issued its directive to hospitals and other acute-care settings more than one week ago. Hoskins said the risk to paramedics and other first-responders is lower, which is why is was “imperative” to start with the hospital directive.
– with files from The Associated Press
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