Travel Restrictions Won’t Alter Affiliates’ Ebola Work

Harvard's travel restrictions to areas of West Africa, announced last weekend, will help ensure safety without stifling the efforts of University affiliates to combat the Ebola epidemic on the ground, those familiar with the subject said late last week.

New guidelines released by the University in mid-October require Harvard affiliates to first obtain the approval of University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 and their school dean before they can obtain University sponsorship to travel to affected areas. The protocols also stressed that affiliates must be conducting “essential business” for Harvard to sanction their work. Anyone who travels to the affected regions will also receive a health screening upon return.

Michael J. VanRooyen, professor at the School of Public Health and the Medical School, said he believes those measures are prudent given the “highly-charged” public debate in the U.S. over the Ebola epidemic.

“The travel restrictions probably make sense right now, given the uncertain nature of border controls and public scrutiny of patients returning from West Africa,” he said.

Barry R. Bloom, former dean of the School of Public Health, called the new policy “thoughtful” and noted that it is unlikely to impede critical health work by Harvard affiliates.

“[The policy] will not inhibit anyone who urgently needs to go…but it will also discourage people who don’t urgently need to go,” Bloom said. “If, however, you’re a physician at a hospital, and you have a good idea of the what the risks are, and you want to go in a humanitarian way, why would we stop that person? That is what’s desperately needed.”

Several Harvard affiliates are leading the effort to combat Ebola, both in labs and on the ground. The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for example, has worked to sequence the virus’s genome. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has developed a device that could potentially treat Ebola.

Several groups, including Harvard-related Partners in Health and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, have stated that the new restrictions are unlikely to impede their efforts to combat Ebola.

Partners in Health, a non-profit healthcare organization with close ties to Harvard, has been working to control the Ebola outbreak and to strengthen healthcare infrastructure in the West African countries ravaged by the disease. Although many of its members are Harvard affiliates, the standards will have minimal impact on Partners in Health, said Joia Mukherjee, the organization's chief medical officer. She added that Partners in Health will not be altering its own protocols in the wake of Harvard’s new restrictions.

Mukherjee, who also serves as an associate professor at the Medical School, said she understands why the University had to implement the travel restrictions.

“As an academic institution, we need to take care of our students, and I think it’s a very reasonable approach to ban travel unless they receive permission,” she said.

Mukherjee added, however, that the Medical School has worked to support Harvard affiliates who wish to join the efforts combating Ebola in West Africa. According to Mukherjee, Partners in Health affiliates, including some students, have already been granted special permission to work in the region.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is similarly providing logistical and technological assistance to organizations like Doctors Without Borders. According to VanRooyen, the Initiative's director, Harvard’s travel restrictions will not impact the initiative’s work.

“The kind of medical screening that Harvard is asking for is now more-or-less the standard medical screening,” Mukherjee said. “We are in compliance, if not slightly more conservative, than what Harvard is asking—so hopefully that will give these institutions the confidence to deploy people,” she said.

Mukherjee also urged for more engagement from Harvard, and said that the University andits peer institutions can “innovate and generate new knowledge to solve this problem,” she added.

—Staff writer Quynh-Nhu Le can be reached at quynhnhu.le@thecrimson.com.