Yes We Love Quarantine. Please Don't Do It.

Health Affairs published today a report by Blendon et al. of the opinions of those around the world toward quarnantines for public health emergency.

Most Americans favor the use of quarantine as a weapon against contagious diseases like SARS and avian flu, but that support dries up quickly when the talk turns to strictly enforcing and monitoring the quarantines. This message is contained in a new study, “Attitudes toward the Use of Quarantine in a Public Health Emergency in Four Countries,” that will be published 24 January on the Health Affairs Web site. While 76 percent of Americans surveyed said they favor quarantining those potentially exposed to serious contagious diseases, only 42 percent supported a compulsory quarantine under which those who refused to comply could be arrested.

Among residents of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the threat of arrest also reduced support for quarantine, according to Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health and his coauthors, John Benson and Catherine DesRoches of Harvard and Martin Cetron, Theodore Meinhardt, and William Pollard of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, in these Asian nations, which recently experienced quarantines and other public health measures in connection with the SARS epidemic, the use of quarantine retained majority support even when the arrest sanction was included.

In the U.S., the threat of arrest reduced support for quarantine especially among African Americans. In phone interviews conducted between 18 November and 16 December 2004, 90 percent of blacks said that they supported the use of quarantine, compared with 76 percent of whites. But when told that quarantine violators could be arrested, only 33 percent of blacks stood by the use of quarantine, versus 46 percent of whites.

This is at the conceptual level vacuous; proof of the obvious. I have a hard time imagining the execution of this study ... zzz ... yup ... same as you guessed before you funded us. But at another level it is important - even fascinating - because it suggests the actual dimension that the police will face, and the specific pressures on politicians that will arise particularly in the U.S.. How will the U.S. government in particular, given the abject failure with Katrina, deal with the clear threat of insurgency when a quarantine becomes necessary, given what the study reveals to be a very large group likely to rebel. Print this one off and send it to your public health commissioner.
[thanks Jim Fossett]