Posted on 10/03/2014 3:39:23 AM PDT by markomalley
People who contract Ebola in West Africa can get through airport screenings and onto a plane with a lie and a lot of ibuprofen, according to healthcare experts who believe more must be done to identify infected travelers. At the very least, they said, travelers arriving from Ebola-stricken countries should be screened for fever, which is currently done on departure from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. But such safeguards are not foolproof.
"The fever-screening instruments run low and aren't that accurate," said infection control specialist Sean Kaufman, president of Behavioral-Based Improvement Solutions, a biosafety company based in Atlanta. "And people can take ibuprofen to reduce their fever enough to pass screening, and why wouldn't they? If it will get them on a plane so they can come to the United States and get effective treatment after they're exposed to Ebola, wouldn't you do that to save your life?" On Thursday, Liberia said the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed in the United States had lied on a questionnaire at Monrovia's airport about his exposure to an Ebola patient. Thomas Eric Duncan's arrival and hospitalization in Dallas have underscored how much U.S. authorities are relying on their counterparts in West African countries to screen passengers and contain the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
Virologist Heinz Feldmann of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has studied Ebola for years and helped develop an experimental Ebola vaccine. He told Science magazine in September that airport screeners in Monrovia, where he spent three weeks, "Don't really know how to use the devices." He said he saw screeners record temperatures of 32 degrees C (90 F), which is so low it "is impossible for a living person." Feldmann said in an email that according to his colleagues who have returned from Liberia in the last few days procedures for taking temperatures and doing clinical checks have improved.
They are claiming it can take 21 day for the symptoms to show up...Half of Liberia could show up here and all be infected and we wouldn’t know it...
I spent most of late July and August in Zambia (and Zimbabwe), at four different airports... lots of days sitting around watching flights come and go from Lagos and other places.
Security is nil... a few times I set off the metal detector and couldn't find someone to double-check me, so I just continued onward to the gates. One time the xray machine that scans your carry-ons wasn't working... the security guy had the manual out, as well as a Windows 3.1 manual trying to reboot and get it working. Finally he gave up and we all just went on through.
On my return to the USA I was surprised to learn that we no longer need to fill out an immigration form (that's where we used to list the countries visited). Now we only fill out a customs form. The immigration officer at JFK never even asked me what countries I had been to.
Maybe some good will come out of this government failure.
The fever screening idea was silly for SARS and ebola didn’t make it any smarter.
How do you know where they originate from? Air travel can be very complex with lots of connections and not even staying on the same airline.
There’s a reason people have been saying for about 20 years this is inevitable. The planet is way smaller than it looks and traveling it is very easy.
LOL. Passport control, flight origination schedule coupled with passenger lists, etc. Are you a Democrat?
How many pages back in the passport are you going to go? You’ll only get flight origination if they didn’t wind up switching airlines. Same with passenger list. I’m a realist who actually bothers to use the stuff between my ears for something other than holding up hair. There’s no actual functional way out here in the real world to block people based on origination.
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