SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia has issued a blanket ban on visas from West African nations affected by the Ebola outbreak to prevent the disease reaching the country, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said, becoming the first rich nation to shut its doors to the region.
Australia has not recorded a case of Ebola despite a number of scares, and conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott has so far resisted repeated requests to send medical personnel to help battle the outbreak on the ground.
The decision to refuse entry for anyone from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, while touted by the government as a necessary safety precaution, was criticized by experts and advocates as politically motivated and shortsighted.
“The government has strong controls for the entry of persons to Australia under our immigration program from West Africa,” Morrison told parliament on Monday.
“These measures include temporarily suspending our immigration program, including our humanitarian program from Ebola-affected countries, and this means we are not processing any application from these affected countries.”
All non-permanent or temporary visas were being canceled and permanent visa holders who had not yet arrived in Australia will be required to submit to a 21-day quarantine period, he added.
A number of U.S. states, including New York and New Jersey, have also imposed mandatory quarantines on returning doctors and nurses amid fears of the virus spreading outside of West Africa. Federal health officials say their approach is extreme.
The Ebola outbreak that began in March has killed nearly 5,000 people, the vast majority in West Africa.
The disease has an incubation period of about three weeks, and becomes contagious when a victim shows symptoms. Ebola, which can cause fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood or saliva.
Australia has contributed A$18 million (US$15.86 million) to help fight the disease but has been criticized by medical groups, opposition lawmakers and rights groups for not sending teams to affected regions.
The risks to Australia were already small due to its geographical isolation, said Dr Adam Kamradt-Scott, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity.
The visa ban, he said, would do nothing to protect the country from Ebola while potentially having a negative public health impact by unduly raising fears about the disease and creating a general climate of panic.
“This blanket ban actually does very little to reduce the risk of Ebola arriving in Australia. It also sends a very bad message both in terms of our humanitarian assistance program as well as Australia’s attitude towards West Africa at the moment,” he told Reuters.
“This is purely just a political decision. There is very little scientific evidence or medical rationale why you would choose to do this, and this is the type of politics we find starts to interfere with effective public health measures.”
Earlier this month it was revealed that Australia had turned down requests from Britain and the United States to send personnel to Sierra Leone to assist in combating the outbreak there, as well as additional funding.
Australia’s “narrow approach” to Ebola makes no sense from a health perspective, given that applicants for humanitarian visas are already screened and monitored for illnesses, said Graham Thom, a spokesman for Amnesty International Australia.
Refusing to send healthcare workers while at the same time refusing entry to those most in need will further damage Australia’s reputation, already under fire over its tough asylum seeker policies, he said.
“There are ways and means in which people can be monitored, quarantined to insure that those who come are free from the disease,” he told Reuters.
“All it does is insure that already exceedingly vulnerable people are trapped in a crisis area and sends a signal about Australia’s commitment to actually dealing with this crisis in a responsible way as a member of the international community.”
(Additional reporting by Lincoln Feast in Sydney; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)