The superiority of the US health system is an irrelevancy if an airline passenger from an Ebola-affected area comes down with Ebola symptoms while in flight to the US.
Whathappens if someone begins to show Ebola systems while in flight? There is no way to quarantine the victim. There is no medically guaranteed way to stop the spread of the virus to the other passengers.
We are all suffering from an erroneous terminological association from the HIV/AIDS crisis. That association is the fact that the virus is spread by the exchange of “bodily fluids.”
This is a very misleading term, in terms of the current Ebola epidemic. This term is much broader in the Ebola context than in the HIV/AIDS context.
In the HIV/AIDS context, the exchange of “bodily fluids” connotes the fluids of intimate sexual contact and ways of sharing blood, such as blood transfusions and drug usage.
These are not the only contexts for the spread of Ebola. For it, “bodily fluids” connotes much more.
In the Ebola context, subsumed under the term “bodily fluid” is human sweat and saliva. Just touching someone else’s skin when it is sweaty and then touching one’s mouth can inflect one with Ebola.
Ebola, in other words, is easier to spread than HIV or AIDS.
We find it the height of irresponsibility for all airlines voluntarily and for all governments coercively not to shut down all non-essential flights to all African countries where the Ebola virus is rampant. That it takes days for the Ebola virus to manifest itself does not mean that it cannot manifest itself during a flight. A person in flight can come down with the symptoms — at which point Ebola is contagious. That Ebola is only spread through the exchange of bodily fluids does not mean that flight personnel or an airline passenger sitting next to a newly manifest Ebola victim could not be exposed to the Ebola virus. It can then spread to others in the non-quarantine environment of an air flight.
The head of the CDC, Tom Friedan, assures Americans that there will be no Ebola epidemic in the US because of the superior health facilities and health system in the US.
We did not know that an airplane is a superior health facility, governed by the superior health system in the US.
It is short-sighted, even from a commercial point of view, for airlines not to voluntarily suspend flights in and out of the Ebola-affected African countries. If someone does come down with Ebola symptoms while in flight, that could stigmatize air travel beyond the flights to and from the affected countries. At least some people will ask: Who transferred from one of those Afro-centered flights to other flights? Which other flight? Which other airlines? How many?
No Ebola patient is guilty of any medical, moral, economic, violent or political crime. Ebola patients are tragic, innocent victims. Restrictions and quarantines in response to Ebola are strictly medical precautions. They are not medical, moral, racial or political judgments. This disease does not discriminate. The fight against Ebola is a fight against microorganisms, not against human beings, countries or races.
It is time to use every medical, tactical and public health weapon at our disposal to stop the spread of Ebola, both for those already affected and for those potentially at risk, as well as in memory of those who have perished. One of those critical weapons is to stop all non-essential air flights in and out of the Ebola-affected areas until the virus is brought under control there.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
