Our health authorities have pressed an ebola alert button and appropriately so. It is intended not to scare us but to make us aware that the virus, not COVID-19, is in Guinea where it has claimed some lives already.
Now that all Ghanaians appreciate the importance of public health and what constitutes this critical subject in our everyday lives and the country’s, pressing the alert button when ebola rears its head in the West African sub-region should not be ignored.
Public health issues have never been so significant in our lives. The fatal ebola, the symptoms of which are somewhat similar to COVID-19 and malaria, the experts have told us, is more deadly than the former.
When COVID-19 struck slowly but steadily in China, many in Ghana did not expect it to reach us. But in a global setting of which we are a part, it did not take too long for the disease to make landfall here as it were. If it took a few months for the virus to reach Ghana from China, Guinea should not be regarded as a country close to Tasmania or the North Pole and therefore impossible to reach us.
Only a couple of countries stand between Ghana and the now ebola afflicted Guinea, a reality which demands that we stand on guard against breaches of our shut borders. A land journey from the frontiers of that country to Ghana will take only a few days.
The porosity of our borders, their closure notwithstanding, including the non-perfect integrity of personnel manning them, is a cause for concern. Many ECOWAS citizens still come in and return to their countries on daily basis although periodic arrests of some are reported in the media.
Guineans, like other West African nationals, live among us and naturally visit their home countries and return. This suggests that we cannot close our minds to the possibility of infected Guineans finding their way into the country.
We are not experts but we can safely state that having been around for about a year now and the fact that most COVID-19 patients have recovered and resumed normal lives, the same cannot be said about ebola.
It is important therefore that personnel of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), Port Health and Customs Division put the interest of the country which houses them, their parents and children above everything else as they execute their mandate on the country’s frontiers.
Compromising their assignments can be too costly on the country they call home.
Perhaps heads of the aforementioned agencies should reiterate to their personnel the significance of being unusually alert at this time of ebola being in the neighbourhood.
We have endured too much of the fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic that we should not allow a strange virus to compound our woes. It is all about understanding the other virus and keeping our land borders really shut.