The Other Ebola Fear: Your Civil Liberties
“I’m not willing to stand here and let my civil rights be violated when it’s not science-based.”
Those were the recent words of nurse Kaci Hickox, who successfully fought Maine’s 21-day home quarantine order last week after she returned from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone.
Hickox first made headlines last month after she was detained in a plastic isolation tent near the Newark airport and later transferred to Maine. The 33-year-old Hickox then defied Maine’s stay-at-home quarantine orders and went on a bike ride, prompting a showdown of sorts. Hickox’s defiance highlighted the science, fear, hysteria, and politics surrounding a disease that has no cure but just arrived to the United States—with four known cases nationwide—from Ebola-ravaged West Africa.
“We have been researching this disease for 38 years, since its first appearance in Africa. And we know how the infection is transmitted from person to person. And we know that it’s not transmitted from someone who is asymptomatic, as I am and many other aid workers will be when they return,” Hickox, who worked for Doctors Without Borders, told Meet the Press Sunday.
Hickox’s plight demonstrates the powers that health officials—from the federal level to every state—have when it comes to preventing infectious diseases. And because time is of the essence to stop an outbreak, officials don’t need a court’s authority to involuntarily confine someone. As New York attorney and CNN analyst Paul Callan described those powers, they’re “as American as apple pie” and date on the books back to the 1872 battle against yellow fever.