Panic, Paranoia, and Public Health — The AIDS Epidemic's Lessons for Ebola — NEJM

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Panic, Paranoia, and Public Health — The AIDS Epidemic's Lessons for Ebola — NEJM.Please read this because we have to remember our history to learn from our history.

Various politicians called for quarantining of anyone who tested positive for HIV, and commentator William F. Buckley infamously penned an op-ed in the New York Times saying that “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed.”

Let us pump our collective brakes.I mentioned in an earlier post that as an infectious disease, Ebola is a slam dunk for a country with a robust public health system. It poses far fewer challenges then, say, a really bad respiratory virus. This technically-but-really-not-an-epidemic has shown that there are some weakness in public health. Particularly in leadership. I'll leave you with a parting tweet:https://twitter.com/RWJF_Live/status/531834485017698305

Health Care Policy, Law, PoliticsMelissa Crawfordebola, epidemiology, health care, health systems, history, MERS, mistakes were made, policy, politics, public health, quarantine, virus