“Right now we know who’s coming in,” Frieden said at the hearing. “If we try to eliminate travel… we won’t be able to check them for fever when they leave, we won’t be able to check them for fever when they arrive, we won’t be able—as we do currently—to see a detailed history to see if they’ve been exposed.”
I do not see the politics in those statements. What I see are statements on public health. People who work in public health (as I do) constantly study the dynamics of disease transmission and refine the protocols so as to minimize disease spread.
The statement on AIDS is probably over-the-top. AIDS currently affects around 35 million, and causes one million deaths annually. AIDS keeps spreading because a asymptomatic person can spread the virus for years. Ebola is never going to come close to that, since it is only contagious when a person has symptoms, and once a person recovers from Ebola, the virus is eliminated from their body within weeks or months.
The statement on travel is correct, too, from the public health perspective. If you restrict the legal movement of people, where they are funneled through the ports where they can be screened, then they start pouring through the borders. When they are pushed underground, what chance is there of finding the sick before they infect other people? However, when they travel legally, the people who are sick can be stopped from flying, without punishing the majority of travelers who are not sick.
The fact is, exotic diseases do make it into the US every so often. Unless you are a public health professional, and you read the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report regularly, you probably have no idea that it happens. Most of our hospitals are, in fact, able to handle the occasional exotic disease. One of my public health friends tells me that, to be accredited, hospitals are supposed to train on proper infection control, and to have plans in place; the fact that the Dallas hospital couldn't handle a single exotic disease until the CDC showed up is incredibly disturbing.
If you really want to stay awake worrying at night, you should try going to some of the conferences I attend. The American Society for Microbiology has some really frightening ones--risks to public health lurk everywhere, and many people die. The work that goes on outside of the public eye to prevent even more people from dying of pathogens is really incredible.
I’m not worried about a thing, honey.
The Good Lord is running this show.