US: Quarantine officer can stop passengers to prevent spread of illness

[hawkeye]

Quarantine officer can stop passengers to prevent spread of illness

Associated Press - July 14, 2007 3:24 PM ET

CHICAGO (AP) - If you're flying home from abroad into O'Hare International Airport, Lieutenant Commander Rendi Bacon cares about your cough.

She is a US public health quarantine officer. Part of her job is to look for bioterrorist threats and new diseases that could cause outbreaks in the United States.

A strange rashor fever on an international flight could cause her to use her power to quarantine passengers. O'Hare is 1 of the busiest of 20 quarantine stations run by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bacon also is responsible for inspecting animals, biological products and human remains when they enter the country.

A day's work could bring a baboon hunting trophy, lab rats, frozen diagnostic specimens or dozens of globe-trotting pets.

Last year, her office handled 311 reports of illness on international flights and monitored the medical paperwork for more than 7,000 refugees.

 

[hawkeye]

Re: US: Quarantine officer can stop passengers to prevent spread of illness

CDC quarantine officers ever on watch
Staff and agencies
16 July, 2007


By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer Sat Jul 14, 1:07 PM ET

CHICAGO - A day?s work for Lt. Cmdr. Rendi Murphree Bacon can mean face time with lab rats, frozen specimens or a baboon-hunting trophy. It can bring refugees from far-flung nations where the crippling polio virus has resurfaced or a traveler with a human skull souvenir.

Her duties include investigating reports of illness on international flights, checking the health of arriving refugees, inspecting animal products and screening cargo. She can seize articles that lack proper permits.

The recent international scare involving Andrew Speaker, the Georgia lawyer with drug-resistant tuberculosis who flew to several countries before being ordered into isolation, has focused fresh attention on health threats on airlines. The quarantine order in Speaker?s case was the first issued by the federal government since a patient with smallpox was isolated in 1963, according to the CDC.

In an emerging influenza pandemic, Bacon could force the hospital isolation of ill passengers ? and quarantine even healthy passengers.

The officers don?t provide medical care themselves, leaving that to local emergency personnel.

"How are you feeling?" Bacon asks the crowd, with help from a Kenyan woman who spoke English. "Any sickness in your group? Welcome."

Every year, about 120 million people enter and leave the United States through 474 airports, seaports and land border crossings, according to the private Institute of Medicine.

Last year, Bacon?s office handled 311 reports of illness on international flights. It also helped with 14 investigations that involved tracking down passengers who sat near people whose illnesses arose after their flights.

"There?s an art in what they do," says Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "This is detective work at the highest level."

Significant progress has been made since then, Benjamin says. But no matter how much money is allocated to the quarantine system, he says, the speed of air travel outpaces the incubation period of many diseases ? meaning a contagious person can cause an outbreak without so much as a warning sniffle aboard a plane.

In her leisure hours, Bacon is reading "The Great Influenza," the account of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

"We?ve allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to a repeat of the 1918 influenza because we take our good health for granted," she says.

She?s never bored. Recently she fielded a question from another airport about a man who wanted to enter the country with his own amputated leg bone. She learned that the leg was amputated 17 years ago in a hospital because of an injury.

She reasoned that any hospital would have incinerated the limb if the man had an infectious disease. And time made a difference.

"Those germs would have been long dead with 17 years of drying. So we allowed him to bring his bone in," she says. "I tell you, there?s stuff like that all the time."

 

[Jonesie]

Re: US: Quarantine officer can stop passengers to prevent spread of illness

FEDERAL AND STATE QUARANTINE AND ISOLATION AUTHORITY:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33201.pdf



And if you have a lot of time to read...
History of Quarantine:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/typhoid/quarantine.html

Remember that the Public Heath Service can be militarized during a national emergency...such as a Pandemic.
And should you accompany an ill neighbor to a hospital, you can be drafted to help care for that person...and more..in the hospital.
So be prepared for that. Take along some extra supplies and PPE.

 

[Solarpanel]

Re: US: Quarantine officer can stop passengers to prevent spread of illness

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