You're telling people that they're not allowed to go to work and earn a living. Depending on their job, they might get fired if they have to take 3 weeks off without notice.

AFAIK, doctors and nurses are already required to take three weeks away from their jobs after caring for Ebola patients anyway. And for everyone else, this falls under short-term disability, so it would be illegal for an employer to fire someone for doing so. That's why companies have disability insurance.

"This understanding is based on more than clinical observation: the sensitive blood polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for Ebola is often negative on the day when fever or other symptoms begin and only becomes reliably positive 2 to 3 days after symptom onset."

Often negative is not always negative. From The Lancet way to heck back in 2000 (fourteen years ago):

"We developed a reverse-transcriptase PCR assay to detect viral RNA fragment in the L gene in peripheral blood mononuclear cells with primers. The PCR assay was negative in all these individuals, whereas the appropriate 420 bp fragment was detected in all symptomatic patients infected with Ebola virus (figure 2). By contrast, second-round PCR yielded DNA products of the expected size (298 bp) in seven of 11 asymptomatic individuals tested but in none of the 13 of the exposed antibody-negative individuals and in none of the negative control individuals (figure 2)."

In other words, the risk of infection by blood from an asymptomatic individual is very, very low, but is not zero.

I believe that any person who treated a symptomatic Ebola patient should be quarantined for 21 days...IF...they exhibit *any* symptoms...even a simple fever.

If someone is already exhibiting symptoms, IMO, that's not quarantine; it is isolation.

Pretty much the only defense against a global pandemic (given the paralytic inaction and general incompetence of the global public health institutions, the World Health Organization first and formost) are precisely those humanitarians who put their lives on the line, and travel to West Africa to stop the disease at the only place where it can be stopped.

When they return, they should be greeted with marching bands, not quarantined. Even if they were contagous. Which they are not, for any reasonable definition of the word.

As I understand it, doctors and nurses have (for a long time) been required to take 21 days away from their hospital duties after returning from treating Ebola patients, per standard protocols. Do you honestly think that people who are willing to go overseas and risk their lives to treat Ebola patients are going to decide not to go simply because they are quarantined for those 21 days instead of just having to stay home from work?

Seriously?

No symptoms is approximately equal to not contagious.

FTFY. People are contagious via sexual contact long after symptoms subside, and in the event of direct blood contact, people could potentially get Ebola from someone who is not yet contagious. The risk is very low, but not zero.

Taking medical advice from politicians is stupid.

What about doctors beholden to politicians?

(Note, definition of most = >50%). Most people that are close enough to get it, never get exposed.
Most people that get exposed, never get infected.

Actually, more recent info suggests that most people who are close enough to get it end up asymptomatically infected—that is, they develop antibodies, but don't get sick.

There is zero reason to quarantine anyone that is not showing symptoms.

Given that quarantining is limited (by definition) to people who are not showing symptoms, what you're saying is that no one should ever be quarantined. Although that's certainly a valid position to take, given the relatively low risk of spreading it even shortly after symptoms appear, that doesn't make the quarantines unreasonable, just more risk averse.

These are two people who have been working in an epidemic site, seen people bleeding and shitting themselves to death, know of other medical professionals who have contracted ebola despite wearing protective gear an following protocols, and still decided that their personal convenience and leisure trumps the health and well being of the general public. This from people who we really should expect would know better.

You'd hope they would know better, but then again, ask yourself how many doctors and nurses still smoke.

Idiots who demand quarantines of people who may have been exposed to Ebola are clueless retards who can't judge the relative threats they face.

You're missing a very important facet of the discussion: the risk-reward ratio. A quarantine requires minimal effort for one person, and has a significant reward—fewer contacts to get in touch with if the person turns out to be sick. Contact tracing, by contrast, represents a decidedly non-negligible cost in time and effort by a lot of people. So even if the risk is very low, the effort for containment to prevent harm still exceeds the effort for fixing the harm after the fact times the probability of that harm.

actually my civil liberties do trump your non-existent right of not dying. One is factual and reality, the other isn't codified anywhere.

... that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men ...

Not codified, my ass. Those two rights are, in fact, of equal weight in any sane society.

Negative, if you're symptomatic you should be quarantined.

No, if you're symptomatic, you should be isolated. There's a big difference. Quarantine is by definition something done to people potentially exposed to a disease, not to people who are suspected of having the disease. Quarantine means that you are kept away from other people to the maximum extent that it is practical to do so until the end of the incubation period, so that if you are infected, you won't spread it to other people before you realize that you are infected. Isolated means that you are in a walled off room, and nobody comes in without wearing protective hazmat gear.

The flu doesn't kill 9 out of 10 people that catch it either ...

Neither does Ebola. With prompt medical treatment, I think the CFR is hovering somewhere between one in two and one in three. And we don't have accurate statistics on the percentage of people who are infected, but asymptomatic (though we do know that it is common among people who have been around infected people). For all we know, the actual fatality rate for Ebola could be 3 in 10,000, though it seems more likely that it is on the order of one in ten.

... and those people are already immuno-compromised

Although that is true for seasonal flu, it is not true for pandemic flu. In fact, quite the opposite; young adults with healthy immune systems are at the greatest risk of death from pandemic flu strains, because their bodies overreact. I think Ebola is similar in that regard in terms of its fatality rate, but don't quote me on that.

We don't curtail individuals' freedom based on potential. You're a potential rapist and murderer, but we don't lock you up for that.

How many days of quarantine does it take to determine whether someone will become a rapist or a murderer? There's a very large difference between a time-bounded quarantine and an indefinite incarceration.

Given that even if they have contracted the virus, they won't be spreading it until the disease has taken hold and caused blood vessels to rupture so the virus from the white blood cells get into other body fluids, there's no reason to isolate them. It's not like they suddenly become contagious within minutes, and can infect others.

That's not precisely true. People can and do bleed for reasons other than disease.

Nowhere does it state that asymptomatic patients were infections.

I assume you mean that they were infectious (because by definition, someone showing IgM and IgG responses to Ebola was infected).

If you dig into the related papers, you'll find that they found transcribed DNA from the virus in the blood, which makes it highly likely that the blood at some point contained the Ebola virus. So at some point during the progression of the asymptomatic disease, it was at least theoretically possible for the person to spread the disease. IMO, catching it from an asymptomatic person falls into the "highly unlikely but possible under exactly the right circumstances" category.

False. Ebola spread just like the flu.

No, it really doesn't.

Are you misunderstanding what "airborne" means in epidemiology?

In epidemiological terms, Ebola isn't typically considered airborne, unlike Influenza, because it is not considered to be spread by microaerosols. Droplet propagation, by contrast, is considered to be "direct contact with bodily fluids". This is somewhat different from the vernacular meaning of "airborne", which usually includes droplet propagation. This has caused a lot of controversy because the CDC says it isn't airborne (based on the strict epidemiological definition), while other groups say that it is (based on the vernacular meaning).

However, the lack of microaerosol propagation makes Ebola is considerably harder to spread than Influenza, because it means you can't catch Ebola by merely walking through a room where someone just coughed or sneezed. The lack of microaerosol propagation is likely in part because IIRC most Ebola patients don't show a significant viral load in saliva (though a few do), and in part because the Ebola virus is an order of magnitude larger than Influenza, which would probably tend to make it settle out of suspension in the air much more quickly, but I admit that I'm mostly speculating here.

It is a FACT that ebola is ONLY CONTAGIOUS when symptoms are present.

Only if you ignore the last fifteen years of established science. Many people get Ebola and never show symptoms at all. We know this because they test positive for the antibodies to Ebola. Those people are believed to have had the virus in their blood at some point during the course of the disease. Therefore, under the right circumstances, it is possible for someone not showing symptoms of Ebola to spread the disease. It is highly unlikely, and has not been documented to occur in the wild so far (that we know of), but claiming that it is impossible based solely on limited anecdotal evidence is downright terrifyingly bad science.

I'd be happy to dig up the citations again if you really want me to, or you can just Google it yourself.

The US is so dramatically different than Africa it is quite literally impossible for the disease to become an epidemic here.

I wouldn't assume that. Most viruses spread more easily in cold, dry weather, which the affected parts of Africa don't really have. The related Reston virus is believed to have spread among lower primates as an airborne contagion in the U.S., whereas that was previously believed to be impossible based on its behavior in Africa. So it could just as easily be true that Ebola is more likely to spread here, rather than less.

Of course, it is also possible that Ebola's sensitivity to dry air will counterbalance any increased susceptibility, and that the virus will be almost impossible to spread here. The thing is, we just won't know until we have a few years of history with the disease inside the U.S.

We have better healthcare infrastructure, we have better hygeine and water treatment, we have different living arrangements, we have different customs regarding the handling or disposal of bodies, and several factors, all of which contribute to making the disease so dramaitcally less likely to spread and kill in our country.

We also have workaholics who go to work sick, which contributes to making all diseases dramatically more likely to spread in this country than in many other countries. You're cherry-picking a handful of differences that support your point, while ignoring other differences that contradict it. Just saying.