QUARANTINES AND STUFF

Quarantines are justified and appropriate when Society is in jeopardy. There are times when individual rights are  secondary to the welfare of the people.

 What is common about Measles, Diphtheria, Leprosy, Small Pox, Tuberculosis, the Plague, Cholera, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Yellow Fever, Influenza, and Syphilis?

They are all among the many diseases that at some time in human history somewhere in the civilized world their presence resulted in some form of quarantine in an attempt to control their spread. Even today active TB is subject to quarantine.

There is nothing wrong and illegal about a quarantine for possible Ebola infection of travelers from the epidemic West Africa nations. However, the governors of New York and New Jersey were shooting from the hip without ascertaining proper facts before issuing their draconian regulations. Yes, the people in  Newark over reacted out of fear.

Moreover, whereas New York City had a facility well prepared to treat active isolation cases, Newark’s University Hospital had only an ill prepared retention tent suitable for perhaps a mass disaster but not for an observation quarantine unit.  

Additional, the individuals interacting with the nurse had no sense of human decency. They were typical self-power impressed interrogators and bureaucrats. Reliance as the definitive indication of infection was placed on a single not repeated skin temperature reading although others were normal.  Skin temperature can be influenced on the status of the skin blood vessels..

The CDC was also unprepared but on 10/27 released the following: “For asymptomatic clinicians who had a high risk for exposure to the virus in Sierra Leone, Liberia, or Guinea, perhaps because of a needle stick, "we are recommending voluntary at-home isolation" upon return to the United States, said CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, in a news conference today. These clinicians should avoid public transportation, public places such as shopping centers, public gatherings, and outside workplaces. 

However, the CDC is not necessarily recommending that they should be strictly homebound.”

There need be no “Lazarrets” for possible Ebola.

To return to those other mentioned diseases and there place in history I am not going to go into detail about each of those other diseases since today we are concerned only with Ebola; but in Saudi Arabia there is a pocket of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and as recent as 2003 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was rampant in China and the Far East.

Those two disease which have a high degree of fatality are airborne spread which Ebola is not.

It was not until the 19^th Century that there began an understanding of the cause and how killer diseases spread. Before then an association between infected people and new cases was realized but the exact nature of transmission was unknown.  

During the age of the “Black Death” the Plague in the 14^th Century which wiped out about 30% of the European Population the connection with shipping became clear.

Venice in 1348 was the first city to establish preventive measures of keep ships with infected passengers from docking. In 1403 Venice established the first lazaret* on a small island adjoining the city. This practiced spread and helped control and end the plague.

In the 1918 Influenza pan-epidemic people were also quarantined. Our increase in life expectancy has very little to do with the way we live but rather with the control of those great child killers ,measles, diphtheria etc.; first by home quarantine and later with vaccines.

The great world killer and destroyer of the American Indian, small pox, has been virtually eliminated worldwide. But there are small residual pockets of these diseases that can reemerge as a pan-epidemic as people refuse vaccinations. 

Yet today zealots in Africa and part of the Islam world are killing health workers who are trying to prevent epidemics such as Infantile Paralysis.

An interesting fact is that in the Bible isolation (quarantine?) for disease is mentioned; "If the shiny spot on the skin is white but does not appear to be more than skin deep and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest is to isolate the affected person for seven days. On the seventh day the priest is to examine them, and if he sees that the sore is unchanged and has not spread in the skin, he is to isolate them for another seven days." Lev. 15/4-5. Nothing is new in the world.

As to the term quarantine; according to sources “The word "quarantine" originates from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning 'forty days'. This is due to the 40 day isolation of ships and people before entering the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia. This was practiced as a measure of disease prevention related to the Black Death.

*(a quarantine station for maritime travelers. Lazarettos can be ships permanently at anchor, isolated islands, or mainland buildings.)