OPINION:
When a government, nongovernmental organization or charitable organization of any country decides to go abroad and do good things, it is they who should be the ones responsible for their personnel or financed volunteers serving in biological “hot zones” (“Taking Ebola seriously,” Web, Oct. 28). Similarly, it is they who should be stipulating in their contracts or financial-support agreements that their people submit to a mandatory quarantine upon their return as part of the travel package.
These doctors, nurses and associated support personnel (who are indeed heroes in the wars against highly contagious diseases) should be able to conquer their own hubris and simply consider a quarantine a part of their job, much like a deep-sea diver must make decompression stops when returning to his surface environment.
The Apollo XI astronauts came home heroes and made no bones about being quarantined for the good of the planet. This is in stark contrast to Dr. Craig Spencer, the Ebola-infected New York doctor who flat-out lied to medical and civil authorities about his travels, contacts and activities, and to the medically cavalier and apparently ego-driven nurse Kaci Hickox, who thought she had the right to threaten her fellow citizens’ good health by exercising her lesser right to move about freely, in spite of knowing the lethality of the disease-ridden jungle from which she returned.
If one has the courage to serve in a medically hazardous environment to save that country’s threatened inhabitants, one should also have the social grace and medical patience to re-enter their own societies without unwittingly bringing a pandemic with them. Further, it should be up to the organizations for which they work to help them arrive at that conclusion.
K.J. DOLNEY
Columbia, S.C.
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