Panel Debates Lessons from Ebola
Original article from: BU Today posted on November 4, 2014. By Lisa Chedekel
It was the bike ride seen ’round the world.
When Maine nurse Kaci Hickox hopped on a bike last Thursday, openly defying a quarantine order to stay home after she returned to this country from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, she intensified a legal and ethical debate likely to have far-reaching consequences in the United States. This according to a panel of BU and Massachusetts health experts convened last Thursday on the Medical Campus to discuss the Ebola outbreak.
“There are actually two epidemics going on,” said panel member George Annas, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a professor at the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Public Health, where he is chair of health law, bioethics, and human rights. “There’s an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. And there’s an epidemic of ignorance in the United States.”
The US epidemic Annas was referring to was both the overblown alarm about Ebola and the resulting government actions, including the forced quarantine of Hickox, who was isolated in a tent at a New Jersey hospital for four days after she landed at Newark Liberty International Airport October 24. She tested negative for Ebola, but was ordered to self-quarantine when she was allowed to go home to Maine. On Friday, a Maine judge rejected state efforts to confine her in her home, but required her to submit to daily monitoring for the virus until November 10, when the incubation period for contracting the disease will be over.