As more cases of Ebola increase in countries, such as the United States and Spain, some areas in the Caribbean and South America have instituted travel bans against West African countries in order to prevent the disease from making an unwanted appearance in their respective domains, according to the BBC.
With the United States announcing their second Ebola-infected nurse, Jamaica, Columbia, Guyana, St. Lucia, and Haiti have announced travel bans against either the affected West African countries or the entire region.
Seemingly leading the charge, Jamaica’s ban falls on “persons ordinarily resident in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone as well as persons who have traveled to or transited through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, within 28 days of having departed from these countries.”
And for those who are Jamaican citizens who have recently traveled to the aforementioned countries, the island declared that they will quarantine those individuals for 28 days.
As for why they are implementing their own travel ban, St. Lucia Prime Minister Kenny Anthony said that poverty and a lack of resources on his island made them unable “to manage any crisis that lands on our doorstep, any crisis of that kind.”
St. Lucia, which has a population of 200,000, said that Nigerians who traveled in to the island would have to show a “recent medical certificate” in order to enter.
Meanwhile, Colombia added the countries of Nigeria and Senegal to their travel bans, even though both countries successfully wiped out the virus.
Guyana and Haiti, though, have the most-extreme travel bans, with Guyana declaring that they will not be giving visas to anyone from West Africa, and Haiti recently tweeted that they would no longer be rotating troops from African countries.
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