Ebola--21 Days of Travel Restrictions

The first patient actually infected in the United States is a nurse out of Dallas caring for the FIRST victim to enter the United States. The CDC states that the nurse broke protocol, but specifically what protocol did she break? The people want to know; health professionals want to know. The CDC must publish this protocol lapse, so we all can be better informed.

I mentioned in the preceding article that health workers are most at risk: this is now a case in point. I pity the emergency physician who first  sent the Ebola patient home, as I have no specific details, but the assumption is that this patient’s blood tests and CT scans were as non-specific as other viral infections common in any busy emergency room.

The only useful information for an ER doc is if the patient came from an endemic area or exposed to a patient who has confirmed Ebola. In the early stages, this is the seminal clue to early diagnosis.

Now, experts and alarmists alike are concerned that the virus may mutate to become an airborne contagion, magnifying its potential spread.

Our health economy would collapse if we have to treat everybody in the ER as if they had Ebola. On the flip side, going to the ER, then, is its own risk: you are exposed to contagious people in a full waiting room under normal circumstances.

My recommendation is that the CDC should restrict travel from any endemic area for the recommended 21 days. If the traveler has to “sit it out” in a quarantine facility at the point of departure, so be it.  

My mother-in-law immigrated from Ireland in the 1940’s and had to go through Ellis Island in New York for similar reasons to screen for TB and so forth. Endemic travelers may need to quarantine themselves in WHO (World Health Organization) designated shelters before departing on public transportation out of an endemic area.

Quarantine hotels or shelters do not exist yet. Nonetheless, we need to heed these common sense precautions of old. AKA Public Health 101.