Restricting travel to stop disease

Regarding “No ban on travel to battle Ebola” (Oct. 3), if I live in West Africa and— oops!— I get exposed to Ebola, I know my chances of survival are slim if I develop the disease. If I have enough money and a passport, all I have to do is get on a plane to the U.S. before my symptoms show, check off “no” in the lame little box asking if I have been exposed to Ebola, and voila! I will get treated by the full force, excellence, and expertise of a U.S. hospital.

It is lucky this man didn’t start vomiting in-flight or at one his layover airports. Anyone traveling from Ebola zones should be quarantined at the departure (or arrival) point for 21 days. Inconvenient? Tough.

Public health officials with soothing words about how hard it is to transmit Ebola are reading us a political script intended to prevent panic. All those protective isolation suits and armed guards quarantining this man’s close contacts belie those platitudes. We don’t need panic, but we do need travel restrictions with some teeth.

There are more restrictive quarantine rules for healthy dogs coming in to Hawaii than there are for humans coming in from Ebola-afflicted areas! Reliance on our health care system to recognize and contain the disease is a nice dream, but the reality is that small human errors, omissions or communication failures occur regularly in the best of hospital settings. It is regrettable but not shocking that the crucial fact that this patient just came from Liberia fell through the cracks during his first trip to the emergency room. Our first and best line of defense is travel restrictions.