Odd, isn't it.
Conservative politicians who have begged off answering questions about climate change on the grounds that "I'm not a scientist" -- here and here and here and here and here -- are now insisting that they know better than scientists about how to handle Ebola. Well, I'm still not buying it.
(And yes, some Democrats, including U.S. Rep. David Scott of Georgia, are becoming instant epidemiologists and public-health experts as well.)
We've been through this kind of thing before, as many of you will recall. Thirty years ago, the Centers for Disease Control was attacked for counseling against a quarantine of all AIDS patients and for claiming that AIDS could not be spread by mosquitoes and by air. Schools were closed to children who were HIV positive, and people demanded AIDS testing as a condition of hiring. In Florida, a family with three children infected with HIV through blood transfusions saw their home set on fire as an effort to drive them out of the community. Even as late as 1992, long after we should have known better, people such as Mike Huckabee were still insisting that it was irresponsible not to isolate those with HIV while the disease ran its course.
It was a closer call back then than it should have been, but the forces of fear did not carry the day over science. They should not do so now.
We've also witnessed a more recent example of what can happen when fear, public opinion and scientific ignorance are allowed to drive public-health policy. It came back in August, as the Ebola outbreak was gaining momentum in Liberia and government officials decided to quarantine one of the poorer sections of the capital city of Monrovia at gunpoint.
Public-health experts warned strongly against the move, saying it would make the situation worse. Based on decades of experience, they predicted that the thousands of people within the area would find a way to evade the quarantine, making it harder rather than easier to track Ebola.** They also warned that people within the quarantined area would lose hope and cease taking steps to protect themselves against the disease.
Unfortunately, Liberian officials ignored that advice. They were eager to respond to public fear and prove that they were taking “common sense” steps to stop the disease, and they imposed the quarantine anyway. Just as public-health officials had predicted, it backfired. People who might have stayed at home instead tried to flee; crowded, desperate conditions inside the quarantine zone made transmission easier. As a result, Liberian leaders were forced to end the 21-day quarantine 10 days after it was imposed.
Again, letting politics drive policy in a public-health crisis is a bad idea. Leave the science to the scientists and the politics to the politicians. And in this kind of situation, the role of politicians is to act as leaders seeking to calm rather than inflame, and to create the space needed to let the experts to do their job.
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** American public-health experts made a similar plea to Congress this week, urging them not to try to impose a ban on travel from West Africa. "Right now, we know who is coming in," CDC Director Tom Frieden said. "If we tried to eliminate travel … we won't be able to check them for fever when they leave. We won't be able to check for fever when they arrive. We won't be able to take a detailed travel history. We won't be able to obtain detailed locating information to pass it to local public health officials."
According to The Hill, a Customs and Border Protection official agreed with Frieden that a travel ban would make it harder for his agency to track possible Ebola cases.
"It is easier to manage and control it when we know where people are coming from voluntarily and not trying to deceive us," said John Wagner, acting assistant commissioner in the Office of Field Operations.
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