Keep Calm and Fight Ebola
Still, even brainless commentary has its consequences. Even in Congress, today's arguments about how to deal with Ebola sound a lot like the big debates that I remember about AIDS in the early 1980s: A frustrating collision of sensible leadership and dangerous nonsense.
Congress has prudently avoided a serious, full-on debate about our new war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. Yet for more than a month lawmakers have been holding up most of the $1 billion in Pentagon funds that the president wants to shift to his anti-Ebola effort in West Africa.
Republicans on key committees want more details on planned uses for the funds, including precautions to protect military personnel from infections and to prevent the mission from turning into a long-term expense.
Those are not unimportant concerns. But a possible ban on travel between here and West Africa also is popular, particularly among Republican lawmakers, even though experience shows such efforts do more to spread epidemics than to contain them.
In today's world, for example, ending direct flights would not have stopped a Liberian like Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola victim in this country. He flew in to Washington Dulles Airport by way of Brussels. Yet a travel ban certainly would make it more difficult to fly in aid workers and supplies to help save lives and contain the epidemic.
Ample evidence shows that the best way to slow the spread of an outbreak is through "contact tracing." Isolate the patients, and then identify and trace the people with whom the ailing victim has had close contact. This country has far more effective and reliable specialists and resources than Ebola-infected counties overseas. But, as the health experts say, dangerous panic can spread faster than the disease.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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