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You may be missing the tone of my question.

How will the federal law interface with state,Texas and local, Dallas and/or whatever county it is in?

May this mans defense drag the feds in?

If Texas dosn't do what the feds want, can the feds override texas?

I don't know the answer off the top of my head, Betty Jo. We didn't study the law of quarantine in law school and it hasn't come up since then.

However, based on my general understanding of federal-state relations - states take care of health problems inside the individiual states, but the federal government has preemptive powers over interstate health problems, and an epidemic that crosses state lines would be under federal jurisdiction.

In the case of a man who doesn't want to go into quarantine due to a localized epidemic, I don't think the feds are going to step in at this point.

However, Dubya did (by executive order) add SARS to the list of diseases that can trigger federal intervention in case of a generalized outbreak - which hasn't occurred yet.

We haven't had an epidemic in a while. The last major epidemic was the 1918 flu, I guess, or maybe it was polio in the 1950's-1960's. I think TB is on the list, too.

If I run across any articles about this, I'll link them or post them.