The CDC Was Wrong About How to Stop Ebola

Wednesday, October 1, 2014
By Paul Martin

Kent Sepkowitz
TheDailyBeast.com
10.01.14

News that a man has been diagnosed with the virus in Dallas days after arriving from Liberia is alarming—and to prevent more U.S. cases, certain rules must never be broken.

The announcement that a case of Ebola virus has been diagnosed in a Dallas hospital sent a chill through the medical, public health, and basic citizen communities. I know my jaw surely dropped as far as it has dropped since 2001, when the word of the first anthrax case in New York appeared in my email. As the details have begun to emerge, many people are wondering the same thing: Will this happen in my city?

The answer is quite clear: Maybe.

The facts are straightforward, at least in the version that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out: A man of uncertain age flew from Liberia, where the disease remains uncontrolled, to Dallas to visit family. When checked for illness on departure, he had no fever. Upon landing in Texas on September 20, he was fine. Within four days, though, he began to feel ill—sufficiently so that he sought medical attention on September 26. That evaluation apparently failed to provide clues to the diagnosis, but two days later his symptoms had progressed enough that he again sought medical attention and this time was hospitalized, placed immediately into isolation, and diagnosed on September 30.

The timeline as presented raises countless questions. First: Was he contagious when boarding the plane and are his plane-mates therefore at risk? Surely not—the most compelling epidemiological fact in the entire tragic seven month outbreak has been the story of Patrick Sawyer, the Minnesotan who after traveling from Liberia to Nigeria, developed symptoms of overwhelming Ebola and died soon thereafter. Although few details have been revealed, none of those who traveled with Sawyer developed the disease despite the fact that he, unlike the Dallas case, was ill with the infection while traveling. And it is axiomatic (and hopefully true) that a person is contagious only when they are sick, not when they are brewing the infection.

The Rest…HERE

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