Dear Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: I am writing to jog your rather foggy memory concerning an event in American history from more than 100 years ago. I am referring to the bubonic plague epidemic in California in the early 1900s. This is a disease that was brought to our shores by ships carrying infected rats and their attendant fleas. Despite efforts by those in the medical community to contain the spread of the plague, politics intervened. What resulted was much dithering, finger-pointing and wasted time. The bubonic plague then jumped species to the ground squirrel. Today, plague is present in some rodent populations in the American Southwest.
Dearest CDC, have you read Marilyn Chase's "The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco"? It is an excellent primer on how to allow an epidemic to spread. Reports theorize that Ebola is present in some animal populations in Africa and was transmitted to humans. The dog of an Ebola-infected nurse in Spain was euthanized. Mass hysteria? It is not so far-fetched to think the dog could have been infected. Infected human kisses dog, infected dog bites squirrel, and now the disease is possibly spread into the wild animal population.
We don't know the science of all of this yet, so caution needs to prevail when protecting the health of our citizens. An Oct. 9 letter writer, a physician, wrote that a quarantine needs to be instituted for all travelers from at-risk areas. I agree.
Tonia Harvester, Hopkins
• • •
The doctor writing Oct. 9 says that the United States should quarantine for 21 days all people entering the country from any area with documented Ebola cases. I concur that there might be more to be done than readying hospitals to deal with Ebola here. But I question the assumption that this step will keep us safe.
Three weeks is a long time for incubation. What about people who travel from areas with an Ebola outbreak to some other country, then enter the United States in those three weeks? Nothing in the doctor's proposed solution would stop them from spreading the disease into the United States.
Since Spain has now had a documented Ebola case, do we quarantine people coming from there or through there? And with the United States now having a documented Ebola case and death, are Americans traveling to other countries willing to be quarantined for 21 days should those other countries choose to adopt this kind of quarantine?
Mary Brady, Columbia Heights
ABORTION
No, it's not a positive force in women's lives
In the Oct. 8 Q&A article "Wading into the abortion debate," author Katha Pollitt argues that abortion is a basic — indeed, positive — aspect in women's lives. No, it's not. The notion that abortion will ensure equal rights and equal treatment for women is nothing but a tragic lie. Pollitt apparently never interviewed the millions of women whose lives have been forever scarred by abortion. Small wonder that there are so many cases of child abuse, when we consider our children as personal property — to be disposed of as we see fit.
