Guinea Resilience System

THE WASHINGTON POST                    0ct, 27, 2014
By Joel Achenbach, Brady Dennis and Lena H. Sun

The Ebola quarantine controversy has become a chaotic brawl involving politics, science and the law. The rules on quarantining health-care workers returning from West Africa are changing almost daily and varying according to geography and political climate.

The Pentagon announced Monday that Army personnel returning to their home base in Italy from Liberia will be held in quarantine for 21 days — even though none have symptoms of Ebola or were exposed to patients infected with the virus.

The military’s policy does not appear to track new guidelines announced Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called for “high-risk” individuals and health-care workers without any symptoms to be directly monitored by state and local health authorities.

ROLL CALL                                     Oct. 27, 20144
By Melanie Zanona

Although Congress has publicly fretted over the threat of infectious disease pandemics, there have been few legislative attempts in the last two decades to address such health emergencies, leaving lawmakers with a limited set of policy options as they try to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Measures targeting deadly diseases have been largely crafted through the prism of bioterrorism threats, as opposed to naturally occurring outbreaks, such as swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

“After 9/11 and the anthrax scares, there was starting to be a lot of attention and money being pumped into public health emergency preparedness and response, but by 2008, there started to be a downturn,” said Seth Foldy, associate professor of family and community medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and former Milwaukee health commissioner. “It bumped up again after H1N1, but then the funding slide began to kick in. There hasn’t been much sustained and strategic attention on the issue.”

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Discussion of the legal and civil liberties issues involved in quarantines

NEW YORK TIMES                                  Oct. 27, 2014

By BENJAMIN WEISER and J. DAVID GOODMAN

It was nearly 100 years ago that an influenza pandemic led to sweeping quarantines in American cities, and it was more than two decades ago that patients in New York were forced into isolation after an outbreak of tuberculosis.

In modern America, public health actions of such gravity are remarkably rare. So the decisions by New York and New Jersey on Friday to quarantine some travelers returning from the Ebola zone in West Africa have taken public officials into unfamiliar legal and medical territory...

UPDATE:    Under Pressure, Cuomo Loosens Policy for Ebola Quarantines in New York

NEW YORK TIMES                                                             Oct. 26, 2014

by MATT FLEGENHEIMER, MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MICHAEL BARBARO