Seoul, Feb 26 South Korea will bolster quarantine measures on people entering from seven African nations as part of efforts to prevent the Ebola virus from spreading here, the health authorities said Wednesday.
Inbound travelers from Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, and Ethiopia will be required to undergo quarantine measures, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), Yonhap news agency reported.
Under the country's quarantine rules, inbound travelers from the seven countries will be required to report abnormal bodily symptoms, such as fever and rash, to quarantine officers when entering South Korea.
The move comes after Uganda recently reported its first death from Ebola in two years. Ebola virus causes severe inflammation and hemorrhagic fever in humans, but there is no widely used vaccine.
"Ebola virus disease is not spreading rapidly in other countries as it gets transmitted through direct contact with the body fluids or tissues of an infected person, but we are working to minimize the possibility of the disease spreading here," KDCA Commissioner Jee Young-mee said.
Uganda last month declared an Ebola outbreak after a 32-year-old male nurse working at the Mulago National Referral Hospital in the capital of Kampala succumbed to the disease, Xinhua news agency reported.
According to Uganda's Ministry of Health, as of Wednesday, the country has registered about nine laboratory-confirmed Ebola virus infections, including one death, and at least 265 contacts of the first case are being monitored.
Ebola is a type of viral hemorrhagic fever caused by several species of viruses from the genus Ebolavirus. Symptoms of Ebola begin with flu-like but can progress to severe vomiting, bleeding, and neurological (brain and nerve) issues.
Ebola can spread to people from bats, nonhuman primates, and antelopes. From there it can spread from human to human and cause outbreaks (where large numbers of people get infected around the same time). Outbreaks mostly happen in parts of Africa.
Ebola is rare, but outbreaks of Ebola disease have happened regularly since ebolaviruses were first recognized in 1976 in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Most outbreaks are caused by Zaire ebolavirus and Sudan ebolavirus.
The largest Ebola outbreak was the 2014-2016 outbreak of Zaire ebolavirus. In total, there were 28,646 cases and 11,323 deaths reported in 10 countries.
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