Fear of Ebola is spreading faster than the disease itself, and the growing paranoia in the United States is fueling calls to impose a travel ban on people coming from the three West African nations struggling with the outbreak.
In a politically tense climate, with the Nov. 4 elections just weeks away, the issue is being supercharged by partisan considerations with prominent Republicans calling for a ban, including John Boehner, the House speaker.
But public health officials say a travel ban would be ineffective and difficult to carry out and would not entirely prevent people in Ebola-hit countries from entering the United States.
Ultimately, health specialists said, a ban would do more harm than good because it would isolate impoverished nations that are barely able to cope with the outbreak, and possibly cut them off from the international aid workers who provide critical help to contain the disease.
The White House on Thursday repeated its opposition to such a ban. President Obama said that he was following the advice of health experts and that 'a travel ban is less effective than the measures that we are currently instituting.'
'If one takes the big-picture view the most important thing that can be done to protect Americans from Ebola is controlling Ebola in West Africa,' said Dr. Barry R. Bloom, a specialist in infectious diseases and public health professor at Harvard.
But Ebola evokes irrational fears - the disease is extremely infectious but also tremendously hard to catch - and authorities must tackle a public health crisis as well as manage public confidence.
So far, only one person has died in the United States from Ebola - a Liberian man who flew from Monrovia to Brussels and then to Dallas. Two nurses who helped treat him at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital contracted the disease.
Fears of contagion spiked after one of the nurses said she had been on a domestic flight the day before she was admitted with symptoms of Ebola. That prompted some schools in Texas and Ohio to close. Authorities have since asked that staff members involved in treating Michael Eric Duncan, the Liberian who died of Ebola, to avoid public spaces.
Denying entry to people from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone would not stop the spread of Ebola into the United States, said Aditya Bhattacharji, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk firm. A ban, he noted, would be impossible to accomplish with 100 percent effectiveness.
What would happen with United States citizens visiting those countries and returning home, for instance? How about dual-nationals who don't need a visa into the United States? How about other foreign nationals who visited West Africa?
Health quarantines have a long history, going back to the bubonic plague in Venice, said Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the University of Michigan. But in recent decades, even with diseases that are much more readily contagious than Ebola, travel bans have been rejected.
A travel ban was never adopted in the 2003 SARS outbreak, which started in Asia, although it affected about 8,000 people worldwide, killing 774 of them. In that case, the World Health Organization issued a travel advisory, Dr. Markel said.
The closest that the United States has come to a travel ban was barring entry to people with H.I.V. or AIDS in a 1987 decision during the Reagan administration. That ban, which did not apply to specific countries, was lifted by President Obama.
Mr. Bhattacharji pointed out that after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, all flights in the United States were grounded for days. That radical measure had an unexpected consequence: it delayed the flu season by two weeks. It was the only example he could point to where travel restrictions actually slowed down the spread of a disease.
While the prevention and screening measures in place today are far from perfect, they allow public officials to track down sick travelers and understand their travel pattern. A ban might lead people to hide their tracks, making it harder to find out who they met or where they came from.
There are no direct flights from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to the United States and only a handful of international flights to Europe. People flying out of these countries are screened before they board a plane. Health workers check their temperature and look for visible signs of illness.
Public officials acknowledge that more cases of Ebola are inevitable in the United States, but can be managed. Last week, the Obama administration said that it would increase screening measures for travelers coming from West Africa at four airports, something European countries are already doing.
Some African countries, like Ivory Coast, have curtailed access to people from neighboring Ebola-afflicted nations, and sharply limited cases of the virus. Dr. Gerald Weissmann, research professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, said he favored a travel ban on 'anyone coming from Ebola-infected areas,' as documented on their passports or visas.
'The objections are very humane and very lovely,' he said. 'They consider quarantines medieval, and think there's a touch of racism in this. It may be, but I wouldn't care if Ebola came from Sweden.'
Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, like blood or vomit. Unlike the flu, which kills tens of thousands of people each year, there is no vaccine against Ebola and there is no cure. It also has a mortality rate of about 50 percent.
That said, the risk of catching Ebola is extremely low. There is no risk of transmission from people who have been exposed to the virus but are not yet showing symptoms. Bleach solutions can kill it. The best way to contain the spread of Ebola is to avoid direct contact with people who have been contaminated.
'A cordon sanitaire of this region would be a public health failure as well as an ethical and political failure,' said J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'We have got to figure out how to avoid that outcome.'
Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 17, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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