Yesterday, a Maine nurse returning from West Africa where she was treating Ebola patients refused to quarantine herself. She insists she is not sick and the government has no power to hold her in quarantine against her will. She has a point, except the point she's making will ultimately defeat her ultimate goal, which is to ensure safe travel to and from Africa for doctors and nurses to help treat the Ebola outbreak. All her uncooperative attitude will do is ensure bipartisan support for a full travel ban, to include doctors and nurses. You may go treat Ebloa, but you may not come back until you've demonstrated you are disease free.
It is unbelievably arrogant for the Director of the CDC, this nurse or any other medical expert to assume that the science of Ebola is settled and that they "know all there is to know about Ebola." The Greek term for this kind of thinking is "Hubris," and it usually precedes a tragedy. Ebola is "extremely difficult to contract," yet a measurable percentage of health care workers both here and abroad, using established CDC protocols, have nevertheless contracted the virus. They are in direct contact with Ebola patients, yes, but they are also supposedly the best equipped and trained to handle the virus. The fact that these experts continue to infect themselves is disconcerting to the rest of us. Enter this nurse. We don't know who she is, or whether she was well trained to handle the virus. We don't know if she followed the proper protocols, or even whether the protocols are truly effective. We don't know whether the virus has changed in some way that makes it easier to spread. All we do know is that we have someone who is potentially infected, who was in direct contact with dying Ebola patients, came home with a fever and now insists that, in her medical opinion, she is not sick, and should be allowed to have cocktail parties, ride bikes and shake hands. Ok, fine, but lets look at this in another context.
What if, just like the last doctor returning from Africa to New York, she's wrong. Ebola is not the flu. I am just getting over the flu. My daughter gave it to me. She got it in school because some parent thought it was ok to send her feverish, coughing child to school. That child coughed on mine, who contracted the virus. That parent was willing to risk my child's health and mine and, in fact, every family's in that school so that she could send her child to school that day. I am not happy with that parent, to say the least, as I take yet another steroid pill and puff from an inhaler. The flu causes death in 1 in 200,000 cases.
Ebola causes death in more than 70 percent of cases. So, out of 200,000 infected, 140,000 people would die, not just 1 poor soul. If you're wrong about sending your kid to school with the sniffles, you spread a flu that, more likely than not, will just make your neighbors and their children unhappy for a week or so. If you're wrong about whether you contracted Ebola while ministering to sick patients in Africa, you kill 7 out of the 10 people you infect upon your return. You infect your child and he or she infects her friends in school and those friends go home and infect their siblings and parents. You are then responsible for an outbreak that will kill those children and their families. It is not simply "relying on the science." It is playing a dangerous game with the lives of your friends, family and neighbors.
So, are we overreacting? The problem we have is that Doctors Without Borders and the CDC have not demonstrated competence in containing this Ebola outbreak. In Africa, the disease continues to spread at a geometric rate. Whatever they are doing has failed and governments are about to collapse. Moreover, the healthcare providers treating these patients are themselves getting infected, even here in the United States where the protocols are supposed to be the best. On top of that, the government continues to lie to us about its plans to contain Ebola. It was reported yesterday, for example, that the Obama administration is putting in place a plan to import non-citizen Ebola patients into the United States for treatment - at a cost of $500,000.00 per patient. The White House flatly denied the report, but a memorandum from the NIH states plain as day that they are putting plans in place to do just that.
Lies, incompetence and Hubris. All the ingredients are in place for a total fail. It is not unreasonable for people to continue to fear that this catastrophe soup our experts and leaders are stirring will soon begin to spill over. Until a full travel ban can be put in place, states should continue to insist on a full 21 day quarantine for all travelers entering the country from those regions of West Africa - especially the healthcare workers who we know for a fact have been in direct contact with the disease.
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