There was no chance that a quarantine strategy could have been implemented or would have worked in the 1980s for HIV infection, for multiple reasons that have been discussed to death.
The Ebola situation is entirely different, quarantine is a highly effective and proven strategy under these circumstances.
The first step is to announce that no persons arriving from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, or DRC will be given visas and likewise will not be permitted to leave US airports unless they submit to a 25-day quarantine at facilities established for that purpose.
This is simple, straightforward, legal, justified by the facts, and highly likely to prevent introduction of EHF into the United States.
The second step is for WHO to close the airports at Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, and Bamako with the assistance of the US Navy (the Global Force for Good) which is the only power capable of enforcing such an order. I am not sure whether or not Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt, and Enugu, all in Nigeria, should be closed - that's a much, much bigger project and may not be justified by the facts yet. Dakar in Senegal is likewise "on the bubble", and the outbreak in DRC appears to be different in behavior than the one in West Africa.
A possible third step would be to close the borders of Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Ghana, Togo, and Benin, but this is likely prohibitively expensive and doomed to fail anyway.
Within a month, hundreds of thousands or even millions of panicked people are going to be on the move - even if the Ivory Coast and Ghana use lethal force on the borders, they won't be able to stop the flow.
Brazil has to watch out for freighters and tramps trying to make the 1800 mile crossing from Monrovia and Freetown to Natal and Salvador - the virus will spread like wildfire in the slums of Brazil once it gets a foothold.
I haven't heard from CDC since Friday (nothing stops a 3 day Federal weekend), so I expect big updates tomorrow.
Jim Noble a voice of reason in the mid of chaos!
I think I speak for the vast majority of those who so many think are being ‘hysterical’ that our concern would be no where near the level it is if the government and medical authorities were taking the actions you describe, but no they are virtually standing at on the sidelines.
At this point you have to wonder if they don’t want a catastrophe to some degree why who knows for power, control, money (funding) who knows, but they are certainly not doing their jobs.
When you look at it most of us are advocating two things one that the government and health services do their job, which is a strict and aggressive quarantine of African countries involved in the outbreak and two that everyone make plans and stock supplies so as to handle a self imposed or ordered quarantine of weeks or months. So what is hysterical about that?
While the body of your discussion is enlightening, I do not believe you have begun to disprove my hypothesis. The introductory claims above do not seem to be correct, and Ebola seems to be very, very like AIDS, except the rate approach to mortality. I believe quarantine could have been much more effective for AIDS, except for the single reason that we would not reject the squalling of sodomites.
Here's a quick summary behind what I say:
From "TKH Virology Notes: Ebola"(click here):
*********beginning of excerpt""""""""""""
Also known as: Green monkey fever
Description. An acute, infectious, hemorrhagic viral fever. . . .
Vector. . . . Secondary spread of the disease is via contact with infected persons or contact with blood, secretions, or excretions of infected persons. However, contact between viremic persons results in infection rates of approximately 10% ---such contact is not an efficient form of viral transmission. Infection via contact during the incubation period is rare. In contrast, nosocomial transmission is extremely dangerous. In all epidemics, nosocomial transmission, via contaminated syringes or needles, was responsible for a significant number of deaths.
In a small number of cases of the Zaire and Sudan strains, patients did not have contact with the blood or body fluids of other viremic patients. In these few cases, it is possible that the patients contracted the virus via aerosol transmission. Although the Zaire and Sudan strains are not usually passed from human to human by aerosol, the Reston strain is transmitted via small-particle aerosol between monkeys and from monkeys to humans. In addition, Ebola Zaire and Marburg virus have been isolated from the alveoli of infected monkeys.
Viruses can persist in injection equipment, multidose medicine vials, or in dried material. The virus can also continue to be shed in the patient's semen for 3 or 4 months after symptoms disappear. In one case, the virus was isolated from the anterior chamber fluid of a uveitis patient.
*********end of excerpt*********
(My underline for emphasis)
A 25-day quarantine is not sufficiently long enough. Six months in medically unbroachable facilities would be appropriate, prepaid by the entrant before boarding a US-bound flight carrying US citizens, the quarantine beginning on the aircraft.The plan you suppose is full of holes, and does not account at all of the deliberate transmission of the disease through open borders. Do recall the methods utilized by immigration authorities in the early 1900s.