Ebola was the last thing on Keith Taylor’s mind when he picked up a flu bug on his way back to Victoria from Madagascar.
Too bad for him that the border officials didn’t think the same way when he landed in Canada.
Alarmed by Taylor’s offhand comment about having a fever, they immediately isolated him in quarantine, despite the 69-year-old’s protests that he hadn’t been anywhere near the Ebola zone.
It was, he says, a gross example of Ebola hysteria from people who should know better.
But the border authorities reply that no, they were just following protocol. What some see as paranoia, others call prudence.
Taylor, a retired Royal B.C. Museum curator, is noted as the author of the online book The Birds of Vancouver Island. He has travelled the world on birdwatching expeditions, and was returning from one such trip to Madagascar when he arrived in Montreal on Oct. 21.
He spent a couple of days in Paris en route, and figures that was where he picked up his virus, as everybody around the French capital seemed to be coughing, sneezing and barfing. By the time his plane reached Canada, he was feeling pretty lousy himself.
So, when the customs man asked how he was doing, Taylor went fishing for a bit of sympathy. “I said ‘I’m feeling a little feverish.’ ”
Officials immediately started talking about Africa and Ebola — “It was the first word out of their mouths” — and whisked Taylor into a quarantine room.
Hold on, said Taylor, Madagascar isn’t even on the African continent. It’s an island nation in the Indian Ocean, 6,800 kilometres from the infected countries of West Africa. (By comparison, that’s the distance from Vancouver Island to Bogota, Colombia.)
Never mind. A health official bundled a masked Taylor into an ambulance and off to an isolation room in Lakeshore General Hospital near Montreal, where a battery of tests for Ebola, yellow fever, malaria and a few other exotic maladies proved what he already knew: he had a garden-variety flu-like ailment. By the time he was freed from hospital, his Victoria-bound plane had gone, so he spent the night at the airport before catching a flight the next day (no extra charge, thanks to WestJet).
Two weeks later, Taylor is still mad. “So far, I have been charged $142.80 for the ambulance and I’m sure there will be a hospital bill coming for the seven-hour stay in an emergency bed.”
He figures federal authorities should pay, since it was their ignorance of geography and tropical diseases that derailed his trip. “Why should I pay for having the flu and the staff’s lack of knowledge and common sense?”
But the Canada Border Services Agency indicated its representative was just following procedure when he sent Taylor to the quarantine room. “Even if a traveller indicates that he hasn’t travelled to, or been in contact with, someone who has travelled to one of the Ebola-affected countries, our officers are instructed to refer any traveller who exhibits symptoms of an illness (e.g. coughing; visible bruising or bleeding; excessive sweating, which may indicate fever; etc.) to a Public Health Agency of Canada quarantine officer,” it said in a statement.
It’s the quarantine officer who decides what to do with a traveller after that. While the health agency wouldn’t address Taylor’s case specifically, it did say its staff have the option of sending a passenger to hospital or instructing them to follow up with a doctor or public-health authorities.
Both agencies point out that Canada’s Quarantine Act requires travellers to report to border authorities if they are ill upon arrival in Canada.
But Taylor argues there is little chance of travellers being forthcoming when the reward for honesty is hassle and expense.
The result, he fears, is that people who really should be screened out will be admitted to Canada simply by clamming up.
“Who the hell’s going to mention that they’ve got a fever?”
