'Ebola Jihad': How Terrorists Could Sicken Thousands

Exclusive: Lee Hieb, M.D., sees transportation restrictions as woefully inadequate

WND

LEE HIEB, M.D.

Deadly diseases do not respect political correctness. Polio was once a disease of the rich, but after the vaccination program – before it was eliminated in the wild – it became a disease of the poor. Ebola is a deadly contagious disease that never got much attention in the past because it was confined to small villages in Subsaharan Africa. Ebola would break out, kill off a remote village and then disappear into some latent host, often for years or decades, only to break out again in another remote spot. Because Ebola is so deadly, it rarely was spread from village to village since no one survived long enough to make the journey.

Transportation has changed all that. Paving the Kinshasa Highway and other roads into the interior of Africa has allowed people infected with this disease to travel rapidly to coastal cities. In the current outbreak, Ebola has, for the first time in history, become worldwide due to air transportation of people who contracted the disease in areas of the outbreak, and then flew.

Several weeks ago, when asked to comment for a WND article on Ebola, I stated that the disease would not be a problem for America if we controlled transportation into the country. In other words, I suggested that we stop anyone from entering the United States whose travel originated in areas of Africa affected by the outbreak of Ebola. This seemed a simple and obvious measure given the nature of this deadly disease.

Sadly, our government failed to do this. Ironically, we are cautious about bringing potentially infected plants or animals into our country, but don’t seem to think deadly human diseases deserve the same scrutiny. And although we were quick to recommend avoiding travel to SARS-infected areas, and prohibited passengers with fever from boarding planes in China, we seem to be applying a totally different standard to Africans. Up to this point the CDC and State Department have only issued travel “advisories,” and the information at the State Department website is tragically comic. They advise travelers about insurance aspects of traveling to Ebola areas, sounding more like your local travel agent rather than representatives of a government agency presumably tasked with protecting its citizens. “The cost for a medical evacuation is very expensive. We encourage U.S. citizens travelling to Ebola-affected countries to purchase travel insurance that includes medical evacuation for Ebola Virus Disease (EVD).” Sadly, I am not making this up.

Simple transportation limitations would have prevented case zero in Dallas. But now the Ebola genie is out of the bottle and probably loosed in America. And it almost could not have been a worse scenario – the patient was not just from an endemic area, but had actually carried a sick Ebola patient to a hospital in Liberia for treatment. That patient and her whole family died of the disease before or during the time case zero boarded an airplane. He changed planes several times through several major worldwide hubs before arriving in Dallas.

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Reposted with permission