What I said was extremely easy to understand.
People can be placed in quarantine for either, as you with the face said. Drug resistant diseases also present additional concerns based on difficulty of treatment, as an additioanl factor to be considered along with severity and infectivity. There is a major public health motivation to contain drug-resistant disease strains, because the proliferation of drug-resistant strains endangers our ability to treat the disease, and the disease may well become more lethal as it becomes more drug-resistant – which is precisely what has happened with XDR-TB.
You’re entire OP has been reduced to “The CDC said so”. That isn’t an attack on your position, I just want to make sure I understand you.
And you are wrong about it not being his decision to make, as evidenced by the fact that he broke no laws.
This whole argument reminds me of the AIDS controversy in the 80’s. The idea that the severity of the disease makes “any risk unreasonable”.
That’s completely POV-dependent, of course. Since you said it, of course you understood it. But I, as the hearer, did not undertand it. As I said. So you can certainly stand on the position that it is “extremely easy to understand,” even after being notified to the contrary by your audience, or you can try to clarify as requested.
To be more specific as to what I don’t understand: What situation did you have in mind what you spoke of people being “unnecessarily placed in quarantine”? What motivations do you ascribe to the CDC that you are questioning? What alternate motivations do you theorize, if you don’t belive the stated ones?
One possibility: Situations where the CDC understands that the patient isn’t a risk to others, but places him in quarantine in an effort to reduce public outcry.
“Any risk is unreasonable” isn’t a fair statement. However, I think there’s a a difference between “reasonable risk” and “a 4.9 percent chance of killing multiple people whose only crime is sitting near a person on an airplane, particularly when the infected person has been told not to fly.” The latter, to me, is not a reasonable risk.
Well, that’s pretty over-simplified but – sure. You make personal decisions based on the information you have, taking into account your own level of expertise and knowledge, and the level of expertise and knowledge of the people giving you the information (and also the urgency with which they are imparting it). In this case, it was irresponsible, selfish, and dangerous for this layman PI laywer to reject the advice, requests, and directions of the CDC. Period.
I guess I don’t object to you taking the position that anything which is not strictly illegal is therefore permitted, though it neatly avoids the moral and ethical in favor of the strictly legal. But in that case you may recast my opinion as being that he made an irresponsible, selfish, and dangerous decision – a series of irresponsible and selfish decisions, actually – that he was, in other words, an asshole. As stated on page 1 of the thread.
Given the knowledge of HIV in the early '80s and the dearth of effective treatment options, there was certainly a valid argument to make that at that time and under those circumstances, any risk was unreasonable. Certainly if you as an HIV infected individual are told by the CDC not to engage in certain behaiviors (like, say, sharing needles or having unprotected sex) and you knowingly do it anyway, you too are an idiot. If they’ve tracked you down in Europe to give you the information and instructions and you still do it anyway, you too are an asshole.
I just want to clarify that I don’t find either Jodi’s or Kokopilau’s positions to be unreasonable. I think the majority of the breakdown happened when the CDC made the phone call to Italy & failed to give a guy who had been repeatedly told he was non-contagious a solid reason to check himself into quarantine. On top of that, they offered him no assistance in arriving home, and acted in a shady manner from the beginning of the fiasco.
If I’m speaker, every alarm in my head is going off, telling me that I’m being hung out to dry. I think he had a damn good reason to believe that he would be detained from traveling to Denver for some period of time.
No one had demonstrated in this thread that the risk was 4.9% in a situation where direct physical contact is not involved.
Let me ask again: What situation did you have in mind of people being unnecessarily placed in quarantine? Have you heard of this happening, or are you just theorizing that because it could happen, therefore it must happen? And on what basis are you rejecting the CDC’s stated reasons for placing Mr. Speaker in quarantine? Because “they did it because of adverse publicity and not for medical reasons” seems like a hell of a leap.
That is certainly a valid opinion. I just think that Speaker’s fear & doubt caused the CDC’s actions to speak louder than their words. I think that continues to be the case, up to yesterday.
…and I honestly don’t think he believed he was a risk to any other person.
Again, he did not know the risk when he undertook his actions. So attempts to quantify the risk after the fact are kind of beside the point. It wouldn’t matter if the risk was absolute zero and the diagnosis completely wrong; he did not know that at the time.
Do I know of a case where the CDC has done so? No. Are there cases throughout history of such things happening? Yes. Has the CDC been caught in at least one blatant lie since this whole thing started? Yes.
We’re going round and round this point, but I still maintain that he believed he wasn’t contagious after several doctors told him so, and after the CDC failed to tell him otherwise.
Yes, they did … in fact, I’m the one that posted the info. Again, here’s the link:
Thanks for validating my opinion. 
Unfortunately I can’t do the same for yours. But out of curiosity, what in your mind changed yesterday?
He wasn’t in a position to assess that risk. The CDC was. He was irresponsible and selfish to replace their judgment with his own. The seriousness of the situation was made starkly manifest by his placement on the no-fly list and the machinations he had to go through to get himself home. Under the circumstances as explained to him in Italy, his actions were IMO inexcusable.
And I still don’t really give a shit what he believed, unless you can give me some rationale why it would be reasonable for him to replace the CDC’s judgment with his own in regards to further travel by air, once they had contacted him in Rome and told him not to fly.
I’m not being combative, but I didn’t see anything in that study that indicated what level of exposure was involved. It said “It has been estimated that, on average, it takes the equivalent of 8 hours of exposure per day for a person to have a 50 percent chance of becoming infected.” However, I didn’t see any statements that indicated that those people who contracted TB from Smear Negative patients didn’t have more contact, or even direct physical contact, with the patient.
Even if the risk was as quantifiable as you say, why wouldn’t the CDC have just communicated that to Speaker? It is my contention that their method of communication was the primary source of the problem.
We are on a website that constantly begs its members for cites. When the CDC failed to provide speaker with any, it became more reasonable for him to question their requests.