Sunday, September 14, 2014

PBS Frontline in Sierra Leone with the Ebola epidemic

PBS Frontline went to Sierra Leone to produce the best documentary yet on the Ebola epidemic.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ebola-outbreak/ .
  The method of eliminating Ebola is much like what was done to eliminate smallpox.  Workers go village to village and house to house to identify anyone who is sick.  Just like the WHO elimination of smallpox operation in the 60s and 70s, people with Ebola symptoms are hiding from discovery because of the high mortality rate for those who leave to go to the Ebola hospital. Privacy in the traditional human rights sense is diminished, balanced against the need to protect the public from infection. In a country with strong civil rights traditions, the door to door operation in the event of a pandemic would be a major transformation in expectations of privacy in a social sense, but also in a legal sense.  

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