Quick Ebola Test, Not Quarantine, Could Be Best Defense

It’s been coming up in just about every conversation I have about Ebola: why doesn’t the United States ban flights from Liberia or at least putting people into quarantine to determine whether or not they have the virus?

Quick Ebola Test, Not Quarantine, Could Be Best Defense Dnews-files-2014-10-quick-ebola-test-not-quarantine-670-jpg

Quick Ebola Test, Not Quarantine, Could Be Best Defense Dnews-files-2014-10-quick-ebola-test-not-quarantine-670-jpg

Both of those proposals have a humanitarian and economic cost that’s hard to overlook. Banning people from traveling to and from Liberia, as well as other affected countries such as Sierra Leone, would put the brakes on healthcare in the locations it’s needed most. And locking people into quarantine for the 21-day incubation period is not free. It’s a civil liberties question; plus it takes manpower, money and time. Not ideal.

Could Ebola Become Airborne?

But in an opinion-piece for the NY Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia and the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, suggests that a test involving polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., could work well. The test involves a blood sample from a person, which then undergoes a chemical reaction to amplify genetic information, including that belonging to the virus.

Mukherjee estimates that a P.C.R.-based technique would cost between $60 and $200, quite a bit less than quarantining someone. And he points out that Texas health officials spent 100 times more than that disposing of the contaminated sheets from the home Thomas Eric Duncan, the first US-based Ebola patient to die.

And because the test results come back “in about a third of the time of a trans-Atlantic flight, the flight would become the quarantine.”

The test is not 100 percent conclusive. It’s been known to give out a small number of false positives and negatives. But those numbers are fairly low overall.

Going Viral: Pandemics in Fiction and Fact

Mukherjee suggests that a pilot program in the hardest-hit area could be effective.

“Ebola is an ingenious virus,” he writes. “To fight it, we need to be just as ingenious.”

http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/quick-ebola-test-not-quarantine-could-be-best-defense-141013.htm
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Quick Ebola Test, Not Quarantine, Could Be Best Defense

Quick Ebola Test, Not Quarantine, Could Be Best Defense

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