.
Nothing can be made foolproof, because the fools are so ingenious. From the NYTimes, “Life in Quarantine for Ebola Exposure: 21 Days of Fear and Loathing“:
… As the Ebola scare spreads from Texas to Ohio and beyond, the number of people who have locked themselves away — some under government orders, others voluntarily — has grown well beyond those who lived with and cared for Mr. Duncan before his death on Oct. 8. The discovery last week that two nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital here had caught the virus while treating Mr. Duncan extended concentric circles of fear to new sets of hospital workers and other contacts…
Dr. Howard Markel, who teaches the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, said the quarantines recalled the country’s distant epidemics of cholera, typhus and bubonic plague.
“Ebola is jerking us back to the 19th century,” he said. “It’s terrible. It’s isolating. It’s scary. You’re not connecting with other human beings, and you are fearful of a microbiologic time bomb ticking inside you.”
While a quarantine is designed to protect those on the outside, it also fuels the community’s fear, and sometimes its cruelty.
In Payson, Ariz., paranoia ignited after word spread that a missionary who had traveled to Liberia on a church trip was spending three weeks under a self-imposed quarantine with his wife and four children. The missionary, Allen Mann, strung yellow caution tape and a “No Trespassing” sign around his front door and left a bucket in the yard for neighbors to drop off food and treats for his children.
While most neighbors understood there was scant risk that Mr. Mann, 41, had carried the disease home, rumors nevertheless coursed around town that he had tested positive for Ebola and would soon be medically evacuated. Mr. Mann said an anonymous commentator on a local news website had suggested burning down his house.
“People had this lynch-mob mentality,” he said.
As with other aspects of the Ebola response, the criteria for recommending or requiring quarantine have often seemed ad hoc, random and evolving…
For the record, before I’m accused of wanting to kill innocent people: Quarantine can be a vital tool of public health, and used correctly has saved millions of lives. It’s the “used correctly” that’s an issue. There’s a part of our brains that never evolved beyond a bunch of primates squatting on a patch of brush, bristling in suspicion of the bunch of primates in the patch of brush over there, who are known to be filthy disease-bearing sub-primates with disgusting personal habits just slavering to befoul our precious primate bodily fluids and destroy our primate way of life. And every petty would-be leader knows that screaming imprecations at those primates-who-are-not-us will attract followers…
“Just Quarantine Everyone, Mission Accomplished!”Post + Comments (29)