[LadyDoc]

Quarantines work. But in many countries a small bribe or hiring a smuggler makes them useless. In traditional Africa, those with infectious diseases like smallpox were put in a hut outside the village, and food and water left at the door. If after so many days the person was disease free, they were left out. If no one ate the food for a couple of days, they burned down the hut.

a lot of people are dying of non ebola disease because they are afraid of going to a hospital. But when we had a cholera outbreak, we were told to put all cases elsewhere. We had no cases, thankGod, but a doc from another hospital used the local gradeschool for this.

and the smallpox scare after 911 had plans drawn up for a similar use of school for giving vaccine while using other public buildings for quarantine.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The horrific potential for H5N1 resulted in some very good ideas, such as cities and towns setting up a system to do regular robo-calls to every telephone and cellphone in the city.

Providing multilingual information as well as having a push button system to gather information. For example “press 1” if nobody in your household is currently sick, “2” if one or more people are sick, “3” if someone has died and needs to be safely transported, “4” if you are in need of food or water, “5” if you need essential medicine, “6” to report dead animals in your area, etc.

Another idea is to encourage stores to have free public hand sanitizer dispensers, plastic gloves and ear loop masks at their front doors, to reduce the possibility of a sick person spreading contamination inside their store.