Wickham: Why not quarantine for flu?

I've given a lot of thought to the idea of quarantining health care workers who return from treating Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three African nations hardest hit by the world's most recent outbreak of the deadly disease.

The more I think of mandatory quarantines, the clearer it becomes to me that the politicians who push it care more about mining votes than keeping people safe from the ravages of Ebola.

While it has killed nearly 5,000 people in Africa over the past year, Ebola has taken just one life in this country. And that man — Thomas Eric Duncan — might have survived had he not been misdiagnosed the first time he showed up at a Dallas hospital with symptoms. That's hardly reason for widespread alarm over a possible Ebola outbreak in the U.S. In fact, the 21-day monitoring period of the 177 people who had contact with Duncan ended on Friday. The two other Ebola patients, Duncan's nurses, successfully recovered, and there have been no new cases.

Even so, the news media's breathless pursuit of carriers of the disease in this country appears to have spooked a lot of Americans into believing an Ebola Armageddon will surely follow if asymptomatic travelers from West Africa are allowed to freely roam about when they return home.

Not surprisingly, a vast majority of Americans support the call for quarantine. A recent CBS News poll found that 80% of Americans think U.S. citizens and permanent residents who visit an Ebola-ravaged country should be quarantined upon their return to the U.S., until it is certain they don't have the deadly disease. And that mindset has politicians genuflecting to their fear.

"My first and foremost obligation is to protect the public health and safety of the people of New Jersey," Chris Christie, the Garden State's Republican governor, said last month in defense of his quarantine order. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, explained that he ordered an Ebola quarantine because "my No. 1 job is to protect the people of New York, and this does that."

Though the New Jersey and New York quarantine policies differ in their implementation, they are joined in their capitulation to political madness. If Christie and Cuomo were really serious about blocking the spread of a deadly disease, they'd quarantine people with the flu.

According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual deaths in this country from flu-related causes between 1976 and 2006 "range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people."

While people with Ebola are contagious only when they have symptoms, people with the flu can spread that disease before they are symptomatic. Contracting Ebola requires close contact with an infected person's bodily fluids. All you need to do to get the flu is be near people with the disease who sneeze or cough — or touch the surface of something hit by their "respiratory droplets."

At least 149 children in this country died from flu-related deaths in the 2012-13 flu season — a time in which New York had one of the nation's highest number of pediatric deaths from the flu. New Jersey had at least four children die from the flu during that time.

With many more flu cases — and flu-related deaths — in their states than Ebola illnesses and deaths in this country, you'd think Cuomo, who was re-elected this month, and Christie, who many think will run for president in 2016, would order flu carriers into quarantine.

They haven't because the public (read: voters) haven't clamored for it.

If Cuomo and Christie were serious about staunching the spread of deadly diseases, they'd start quarantining people with the flu. But that won't happen as long as they put politics ahead of science when it comes to the health of the residents of their states.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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