(Newswire.net — October 14, 2014) — A few hours after the first Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, died of the illness, government officials unveiled new rules. Now, CDC may “isolate, quarantine, or issue a conditional release order to any arriving person who is reasonably believed to be infected with or exposed to Ebola,” CDC Public Affairs Director Barbara Reynolds told Yahoo News in an email.
Reynolds wrote in her email that refusal to be screened or to respond to public health questions will be considered a “reasonable belief as to whether the individual may be infected with or exposed to Ebola.”
“CDC’s Quarantine Public Health Officers are responding almost daily to potential public health threats in airports and are trained to help a traveler to understand what is being done and why every step of the way,” said Reynolds. An unnamed government official told Yahoo News that CDC would likely quarantine someone until they agreed to answer questions of potential Ebola exposure and have their temperature taken.
Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, permits the federal government to take steps necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases. That applies to foreign citizens as well as to domestic. Further more, it allows the government to detain individuals “reasonably believed” to be infected as long as it may be reasonably necessary. However, it also empowers the government to carry out any inspection, fumigation, etc., also the destruction of animals or basically anything found to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, this does not only apply to Ebola suspects. “CDC has delegated authority to apprehend, detain, examine, and conditionally release individuals with certain [all] communicable diseases that are specified in an executive order of the president,” said Reynolds.
“In public health, most fundamentally there’s a right to protect the public. And we can do that by isolating individuals who may be infectious and may be a risk to the public.”said CDC Director Thomas Frieden on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.