Cooler heads should prevail in response to Ebola crisis

Before America is turned into one giant isolation ward for health-care workers returning from Ground Zero of the Ebola virus disease, governors should take a step back and listen to what the medical experts have to say.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine written by several physicians offered this important analysis:

“Health care professionals treating patients with this illness have learned that transmission arises from contact with bodily fluids of a person who is symptomatic — that is, has a fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and malaise. We have strong reason to believe that transmission occurs when the viral load in bodily fluids is high, on the order of millions of virions per microliter. This recognition has led to the dictum that an asymptomatic person is not contagious; field experience in West Africa has shown that conclusion to be valid.”

The authors of the article contend that an a symptomatic health-care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious.

The piece was prompted by New York, New Jersey and other states imposing 21-day quarantines on health-care workers returning to the U.S. from West Africa, where the Ebola disease has claimed at least 5,000 deaths.

The governors insist that their actions are prompted by their desire to protect the public from this deadly virus.

However, given what the medical experts have to say about contagion, and the urgent need to stop the spread of the Ebola virus in the three West African countries that are the source — Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone — we would hope that cooler heads prevail. The last thing this country needs is for the American people to get swept up in the hysteria that’s being triggered mostly by critics of President Barack Obama.

Global fight

As the president made clear this week, any actions that would dissuade health care workers from traveling to West Africa as part of the global fight against Ebola could ultimately be detrimental to the safety of this country.

The U.S. is not alone in the fight. Numerous countries have joined forces in launching an aggressive campaign to not only stop the spread of the disease but to find a way of eradicating the virus.

President Obama has not criticized the governors who have taken it upon themselves to impose even stricter rules than those issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but he has expressed concern that health-care workers may be dissuaded from volunteering.

The demand for volunteers is great, indeed.

Here’s what the physicians wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine:

“Hundreds of years of experience show that to stop an epidemic of this type requires controlling it at its source. (Doctors Without Borders), the Agency for International Development and many other organizations say we need tens of thousands of additional volunteers to control the epidemic. We are far short of that goal, so the need for workers on the ground is great.”

It’s time for the politicians to listen to the experts.

Let’s not get caught up in the hysteria that is beginning to sweep the country.