another thought...

On this whole "TB man" mess:

I hope to GOD this serves as a wakeup call before someone jets across the Atlantic carrying Ebola, or a form of bird flu that can spread from human to human, or some gosh-awful tropical disease we don't even know about yet.

I mean - remember last year and the year before, all the bird flu fears? All the suggestions that we have canned goods on hand and contemplate trying to live for months without ever leaving our homes? And then that all evaporated (at least for a while) as the bird flu ebbed and other things (like AnnaNicoleSmith) occupied the small minds of the journalistic class?

Seriously. Disease being carried worldwide on jets is a damn big scary thing. It's something we should pay attention to. I'm not an epidemiologist, as I said before, but I know enough about it to know that for every person who's directly infected with something, there can be a huge ripple effect of further infections: you know the whole "six degrees of separation" thing? Think about that but with something that could kill you dead.

I guess I tend to be a bit paranoid about this kind of thing. I've read both "The Hot Zone" and "Demon in the Freezer" and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think twice about spending a lot of time in crowded public places like movie theaters after reading both those books.

It looks like there was bungling on the part of the CDC, the Canadian border guard ("He looked perfectly healthy to me, eh?"), and the agents at the airport. And of course the guy infected is the main one to blame - apparently, he and his wife were told, in Italy "Wait for the authorities; they will pick you up at your hotel and we will proceed from there" and they decided that wasn't good enough for them, so they bolted - and he maybe infected a lot of people in the process.

(Yes, yes, I know: he looked perfectly healthy, it's not like he was coughing up blood or anything, but there is still a risk, however small, of infection AND HE KNEW ABOUT IT. But he decided his comfort and happiness was more important, and so he got on a plane and sneaked back into the U.S.

Interesting, that: "everyone" talks about how much better socialized health care (as in Europe or Canada) is, and yet - this guy wasn't going to sit tight and let some Dottore or medicin attend to him - no, he wanted to get back to the U.S. And while I don't blame him from the standpoint that it would be kind of a nightmare to be a foreigner sick in a highly bureaucratic country where healthcare was essentially rationed, he went about everything totally the wrong way.

First step, I think, would have been to call the U.S. Consulate or Embassy, or whatever, and explain:

I'm infected with a bad and possibly contagious disease. I have a very strong desire to get back to the U.S. to have it treated. Can you help me?

I mean - even if it came down to CHARTERING a damn plane [and this guy's an attorney - I think I read he's a personal-injury attorney, sweet irony - so he can very likely afford it]. But you don't do a run for the border and figure you can sneak your way back in.)

And even beyond that - this whole mess may very well have sent a big glaring message to those who would do us ill: Put a sick dude on a plane. Send him to the U.S., even if he has to fly to Canada or Mexico and sneak in. Let him roam at will, preferably in a large city, and infect lots of people. His victims will continue to infect others.

Scares the crap out of me. I'm almost afraid I wrote it down. I hope that security at airports stops taking 95 year old womens' walkers apart and confiscating knitting needles long enough that they can check to see if anyone's, you know, coughing up blood or something.

(And considering that some of those who would do us ill have no compunction about blowing themselves up to take out a few innocent bystanders and spread terror, I can imagine a new wave of "suicide bombers" in the form of "Patient Zeros" of epidemics.)