WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation’s top infectious control doctor says mandatory quarantines of health care workers returning from West Africa can have the unintended consequence of discouraging them from volunteering in the Ebola-ravaged region.
Dr. Anthony Fauci (FOW’-chee) is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He says that as a physician and scientist, he would not have recommended a quarantine.
New York, New Jersey and Illinois have imposed mandatory quarantines on travelers returning from West Africa who had contact with Ebola patients.
That move followed an Ebola diagnosis in a Doctors Without Borders doctor last Thursday. The doctor is now in isolation at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Fauci tells “Fox News Sunday” that active and direct monitoring can accomplish the same thing.