The 90 Nigerian students coming to study in Barbados will be given the specific Ebola virus disease (EVD) test before leaving, to allay Barbadian fears about any possibility of their bringing the deadly disease here.
Organiser of the trip, Donna St Hill, said though the students had already been medically cleared for travel to Barbados, “we don’t want them to come and have to experience any stigma. We don’t want people to be afraid they cannot deal with them”. Therefore the test would be administered.
“They are the ones who will have a medical certificate saying they have no diseases . . . . We are going to go one step further because that was a basic condition of being accepted into the programme, but given that there is still the concern, we are going to give them the specific Ebola EVD test that would prove definitively,” St Hill told the media after attending a lecture on Ebola and other emerging infectious diseases at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre Tuesday night.
The Barbados Drug Service organised the lecture which was given by consultant in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Dr Corey Forde.
