Mandatory quarantining of medical workers returning from Ebola hot zones is a step "too far" in the public health response to a virus that is both difficult to contract and containable because it progresses slowly, a Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist told
Newsmax TV on Monday.
Quarantine as a default tactic goes "beyond what it is that we need, because if you're healthy — if you're not sick — you can't transmit Ebola," medical doctor and professor William Schaffner, past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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"Then, even if you do get sick, you have to have contact with blood and bodily fluids," Schaffner continued. "From a public health point of view, if you're well, you can be out and about hugging your friends and doing whatever you normally do because you are not hazardous until you become sick."
With controversy erupting over
quarantine orders in New York and New Jersey, Schaffner said that even an Ebola-infected person does not pose a threat to others at the onset of symptoms.
He said Ebola "doesn't begin like flipping on a light switch, and you suddenly become very febrile, have a high fever, start vomiting and having diarrhea instantaneously.
"You begin to feel poorly, " he said, describing the illness's progression. "Your temperature goes up. You have plenty of time to confine yourself and to notify healthcare authorities and further at the onset of disease."
A Doctors Without Borders nurse,
Kaci Hickox, who has not tested positive for the disease, will be allowed to spend the rest of her cautionary 21-day confinement at home in Maine, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie decided on Monday.
Hickox protested her weekend in quarantine in New Jersey, and threatened to sue, after she landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday.
She had been treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone — one of three west African nations, including Guinea and Liberia, where nearly 5,000 people have died in the last outbreak, according to estimates.
A Doctors Without Borders volunteer who did return from Guinea with the virus, New York physician Craig Spencer,
remains in isolation at the city's Bellevue Hospital.
Spencer had moved about freely since returning from overseas, and he reportedly notified health officials as soon as he developed a fever on Thursday.
"All those people that Dr. Spencer had contact with — on the subway, while bowling — they're essentially at zero risk," said Schaffner. "The [New York City] health department is going out to them to comfort them, educate them, and put them under our watch. They're going the extra 3 or 4 miles. I expect there to be zero cases transmitted from Dr. Spencer."
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Schaffner acknowledged that the U.S. healthcare system as a whole "took more time to respond" to Ebola "than people, such as myself, even anticipated on the front end."
But he voiced confidence that the system is adapting in the wake of infections at a Dallas hospital where two nurses apparently contracted the virus from a dying Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan.
Both nurses have now been declared free of the disease.
Schaffner also said the airport screening regimens now in place — abroad in western Africa and here in the United States — mean that "the influx of individuals is now well controlled."
Aid workers and other travelers are "screened before they leave" the affected countries, and screened again when they arrive at one of five U.S. airports those travelers are now required to use.
"A risk assessment is made, such as if you had contact with Ebola patients or not, they're then asked to monitor themselves," Schaffner said of returnees. "And that system will work, and is a reasonable compromise . . . without locking people up and taking their civil liberties away from them."
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