Although several U.S. universities have decided to ask people from countries heavily affected by severe acute respiratory syndrome to stay away, Northwestern officials said they are not making any new policies.
The University of California at Berkeley announced last week a controversial decision to bar students from East Asia from attending the university’s summer programs. Since then other universities have asked visitors from SARS-infected regions not to attend spring graduation ceremonies.
University Provost Lawrence Dumas said NU will not restrict students and visitors from East Asia but will continue to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations, which discourage travel to those areas. Dumas announced in March that students would not be allowed to participate in study-abroad programs in any country where a U.S. Department of State travel warning is in place.
NU is relying on the government to screen potentially infected travelers, he said. People coming into the United States, including students and researchers, must pass through interviews, medical examinations and even airline employees who now watch for symptoms of SARS.
“We depend on them to check for a sick person,” Dumas said. “We’re assuming these kinds of systems work.”
Most universities have decided to adopt the CDC’s guidelines as their policy toward students traveling in countries affected by SARS, Dumas said, but Berkeley chose differently.
Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Berdahl, announced last Friday the plan to bar students from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan from attending summer courses and canceled summer programs aimed at people from those regions.
About 85 percent of more than 7,000 SARS cases worldwide have occurred in the three place, according to a Thursday CDC report. The disease caused 445 deaths in that region out of 506 fatalities worldwide.
“If a number of people arriving from these areas develop symptoms, they would have to go into voluntary isolation. And the university would have to make sure their medical and nutritional — all their needs — are met,” Tomas Aragon, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness, said in a press release Wednesday.
Dumas said the ban was probably the best decision for Berkeley.
“Lots of universities have been deciding new policies,” he said. “Most are saying we’ll use the advice of the experts — in the Berkeley case I think they did follow that advice. City and campus health officials got together and in that specific circumstance, (barring students) sounds like good health policy.”
Berkeley’s policy is the first to place restrictions on people coming from East Asia, but in the past few weeks, many universities have been discouraging travel in affected areas.
Bill Anthony, director of NU’s Study Abroad Office, said he has been recommending students in in the region leave their return to the United States. Several students from Vietnam and China already have returned, he said.
Weinberg junior C.J. Willey had resisted administrators’ requests to leave his program in China, telling The Daily about three weeks ago that he would stay as long as possible. Since then Willey has decided it is too risky and is planning to return to the United States on Monday.
“The illness is still on a relatively small scale and I don’t feel endangered,” Willey wrote in an e-mail Thursday. “But in the worst case scenario that I did contract SARS, it would be pretty selfish to put my family through the ordeal of having me thousands of miles away and in a Chinese hospital.”
