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Doctors Say Quarantining Medical Workers Just Makes the Ebola Epidemic Worse

Fear-based policies embraced by New York, New Jersey, and other states aren't helping.

Photo of medical workers in West Africa via the European Commission DG ECHO Flickr account

The New England Journal of Medicine doesn't usually wade into whatever political issue is lighting up cable news, so it was something to see the two-century-old publication take a swipe at governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo on Monday for their quarantining of health care workers returning from Ebola-plagued African countries. In an editorial published on the Journal's website yesterday, seven doctors with more initials after their names than I can count tried to stem the flow of reactionary paranoia and fear that has gripped some Americans and has been fed by politicians eager to convince people they're doing something, anything, about Ebola.

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The Journal, not surprisingly, had some sound reasoning behind its condemnation of Christie and Cuomo, who last weekend announced that people who had worked with Ebola patients would have to be quarantined for 21 days, even though the disease is only contagious when sufferers have obvious symptoms like fever. The thrust of the Journal's argument is pretty simple: Quarantining health workers might have a chilling effect on others looking to travel to Ebola-stricken countries and perform the much-needed task of treating the men, women and children suffering from the deadly virus.

"Hundreds of years of experience show that to stop an epidemic of this type requires controlling it at its source," the doctors wrote, noting that "tens of thousands of volunteers" are needed to control the spread of Ebola. "We are far short of that goal, so the need for workers on the ground is great. These responsible, skilled health-care workers who are risking their lives to help others are also helping by stemming the epidemic at its source. If we add barriers making it harder for volunteers to return to their community, we are hurting ourselves."

Doctors Without Borders, the organization most responsible for fighting Ebola in Africa, agreed with that sentiment in a press release: "Any regulation not based on scientific medical grounds, which would isolate healthy aid workers, will very likely serve as a disincentive to others to combat the epidemic at its source, in West Africa."

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This obviously stands in stark contrast to the calls for travel bans that have come from some Republican politicians who seem more concerned with the politics of the issue than the facts on the ground. (For one thing, stopping someone from flying directly from the affected region to the US wouldn't stop them from traveling to the US by way of other countries.) Clear-headed arguments like the Journal's also counteract naked fearmongering from certain cable news hosts.

"What this underscores is that the system is flawed because it relies on individuals and their sense of honesty," Megyn Kelly said on her Fox News show, disregarding the idea that a doctor who has treated Ebola patients would be responsible enough to monitor himself for symptoms-and Craig Spencer, New York's only Ebola patient so far, called in the appropriate authorities as soon as his temperature passed the 100-degree mark. In other words, he did everything right, and as the Journal correctly emphasized, he wasn't a danger to those around him before his fever set in:

An asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community.

But none of that matters to some media outlets and politicians bowing to the public's fearful need to see travel bans and quarantines. Maybe that has something to do with the deadly nature of the disease, or maybe it has something to do with where Ebola is coming from: Third-world countries. Foreign places whose people are infecting us with something that should only be affecting them.

"We should be guided by the science and not the tremendous fear that this virus evokes," the Journal concluded. "We should be honoring, not quarantining, health care workers who put their lives at risk not only to save people suffering from Ebola virus disease in West Africa but also to help achieve source control, bringing the world closer to stopping the spread of this killer epidemic."

President Obama concurred with the Journal in spirit on Tuesday afternoon, saying that as a country, "We don't just react based on our fears. We react based on facts and judgment."

He's wrong: As the last several days have shown, Americans really, really love reacting just based on our fears. But that doesn't mean we have to.

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