{"id":16407,"date":"2014-10-15T17:15:19","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T15:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=16407"},"modified":"2014-10-15T18:18:10","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T16:18:10","slug":"us-college-bans-all-students-from-ebola-countries-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=16407","title":{"rendered":"US college bans all students from Ebola countries in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNavarro College is not accepting international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was with shock that 33-year-old Nigerian-American academic Idris Bello read this sentence, signaling the rejection of a friend\u2019s Nigerian brother-in-law to the Texas community college based solely on his citizenship. \u201cI didn\u2019t believe it, I was so surprised. I thought: This cannot be,\u201d Bello says.<\/p>\n

A lead entrepreneur in Africa, with a master\u2019s degree in global health from Oxford University, Bello received a copy of the letter from Dr. Kamor Abidogun, a mechanical engineer and friend of his in Houston. Abidogun\u2019s brother-in-law also decided to apply to Navarro, and used his address as the point of contact. Along with the letter he received rejecting his 29-year-old brother-in-law, Abidogun received an identical one for his 20-year-old nephew, who had also decided to apply from Nigeria.<\/p>\n

\"ebola-letter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the letter, the small community college 20 miles outside of Dallas has decided to stop accepting students from places with confirmed cases of Ebola. Nigeria, it seems, is an odd place to enact that policy. The country of 174 million has only registered 20 total cases of Ebola since the index patient in July, a response so strikingly effective that the CDC dispatched a team to the country to study their methods.<\/p>\n

Already through the first 21-day incubation period following the initial cases, the country is now just five days away from being officially declared by the World Health Organization as Ebola-free. Much of the response is believed to center around what WHO has declared \u201cworld-class epidemiological detective work,\u201d which traced all 20 cases back to one passenger at the Lagos airport\u2014ironically, an American.<\/p>\n

Unlike its three most affected neighboring countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, Nigerian citizens are under no threat of becoming infected with the disease within their borders, or at least no more than the threat we face in our country\u2014and definitely not as much risk as an institution merely minutes away from its own outbreak.<\/p>\n

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The country of 174 million has only registered 20 total cases of Ebola since the index patient in July, a response so strikingly effective that the CDC dispatched a team to the country to study their methods.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seven days after receiving the letter from Navarro, Abidogun had yet to break the \u201cbad news\u201d to his brother-in-law and his nephew. Neither applied to other universities. Living in Ibadan, Oyo State, neither are anywhere close to the small epidemic that swept through Nigeria in July\u2014nor have either of them ever visited the most affected countries.<\/p>\n

While Bello says he\u2019s faced this kind of misinformed fear himself\u2014he was recently stopped at a gym in Houston and asked if he\u2019s Liberian, for example\u2014he was most shocked to find an actual college making the same judgments. \u201cI\u2019ve had several people in the community act that way, but this is the first time I was going [heard] that from an institution,\u201d says Bello. \u201cAn institution of learning, for that matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t the only one appalled by the news. When Bello posted the letter on his website, many took to Twitter to express similar feelings of disappointment. \u201c@NavarroCollege<\/a> so you won\u2019t be accepting any Americans given Texas has confirmed cases? Seems like your enrollment will plummet. #messedup<\/a>,\u201d wrote one user. \u201cI\u2019m sure they didn\u2019t mind discriminating against students from Africa beforehand, but this just gives them a new easy out,\u201d posted another. \u201cWhat a gross display of open bias. They descended too low. My brother, just choose another school,\u201d said a third.<\/p>\n

For Bello, spreading the message of this case isn\u2019t about Navarro. Instead, it\u2019s about influencing how American universities handle the epidemic in relation to their admissions moving forward. \u201cI understand the fear about Ebola, but we\u2019re not going to tackle epidemics by being scared or by misinformation, it\u2019s going to be true education,\u201d says Bello. \u201cThey are teaching students to be leaders in the future. Someone from that school needs to step forward and say, listen we made a mistake we are going to fix that mistake.\u201d – thedailybeast.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNavarro College is not accepting international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases.\u201d It was with shock that 33-year-old Nigerian-American academic Idris Bello read this sentence, signaling the rejection of a friend\u2019s Nigerian brother-in-law to the Texas community college based solely on his citizenship. \u201cI didn\u2019t believe it, I was so surprised. I thought: This … Continue reading “US college bans all students from Ebola countries in Africa”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,123],"tags":[9128,3941,1410,2470,2474],"class_list":["post-16407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","category-world","tag-ebola","tag-guinea","tag-liberia","tag-nigeria","tag-sierra-leone"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16417,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16407\/revisions\/16417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}