Quarantine quarrels

Congress took testimony on the controversy over whether travel bans or quarantines might impede efforts to contain Ebola at its source:
Rabih Torbay, senior vice president at International Medical Corps, testified that imposing quarantines would strongly discourage volunteer healthcare workers from assisting in the relief effort. 
As an example, he said, the IMC requires a six-week minimum commitment to treat Ebola patients. Adding a 21-day quarantine would stretch doctors' furloughs to nine weeks, a period of leave that few hospitals would allow. 
"We cannot recruit staff from the U.S. or anywhere else in the world if there is not a chance they could come back to their families and their [jobs]" quickly, Torbay told lawmakers. 
"Putting people in quarantine goes against our ability to recruit and retain [staff], and therefore, it will go against our ability to fight against the virus in West Africa."
Wait, so the problem with quarantine is that travelers from Africa who have been treating large numbers of Ebola patients under primitive conditions need to be able to go right back to work at their American hospitals as soon as they return, without waiting 21 days to see whether they're unlikely to have contracted the disease?

I thought the bowling doctor in New York was a little complacent, but at least he didn't (as far as I know) go back to work at his ER while he was self-monitoring for 21 days.

4 comments:

douglas said...

Well, if they are taking six week furloughs, then I suppose half of that will have to be isolation on return. So they'll shorten their tours to three weeks- yes, it's problematic, but it seems to me to be a new idea that the primary means of controlling epidemic is treatment and not containment and isolation- at least until a vaccine is available.

Why has this changed?

The idea that you'd send a doctor or nurse home and back to work treating patients after treating ebola victims abroad, given the record of transmission to health care workers, seems irresponsible at best and reckless to the point of criminal at worst. It's as if these people never heard of Typhoid Mary. They do seem to have the same persistence of denial though.

Anonymous said...

The invention of the airplane has allowed the quick return. Require them to come back by boat. They need the decompression time, anyway.


Valerie

Texan99 said...

Considering what happened to Texas Health Presbyterian when the public got scared, I should think the hospitals would be at pains to prove to the public that their doctors are not showing up in the ER fresh off a plane from West Africa, where they spent the last six weeks elbow deep in contagious bodily fluids, and where eleven doctors from Medicins Sans Frontiers already have contracted Ebola and seven have died. Soon I suppose patients will be asking their doctors the same questions doctors are supposed to be asking patients: Have you recently traveled here from West Africa? Are you experiencing any symptoms from the following list?

Today's news is that the unhappy nurse got sprung from quarantine. For her sake and the sake of her family and patients, let's hope she's not sick.

Ymar Sakar said...

"Impede", hah.