To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (173681 ) 10/15/2014 5:09:41 PM From: FJB 4 RecommendationsRecommended By
Respond to Flashback April 2010: Obama Kills Bush Quarantine Rules USA Today :The Obama administration has quietly scrapped plans to enact sweeping new federal quarantine regulations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touted four years ago as critical to protecting Americans from dangerous diseases spread by travelers. The regulations, proposed in 2005 during the Bush administration amid fears of avian flu, would have given the federal government additional powers to detain sick airline passengers and those exposed to certain diseases. They also would have expanded requirements for airlines to report ill passengers to the CDC and mandated that airlines collect and maintain contact information for fliers in case they later needed to be traced as part of an investigation into an outbreak. Airline and civil liberties groups, which had opposed the rules, praised their withdrawal. The Air Transport Association had decried them as imposing "unprecedented" regulations on airlines at costs they couldn’t afford…. The American Civil Liberties Union had objected to potential passenger privacy rights violations and the proposal’s "provisional quarantine" rule. That rule would have allowed the CDC to detain people involuntarily for three business days if the agency believed they had certain diseases: pandemic flu, infectious tuberculosis, plague, cholera, SARS, smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria or viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola. "The fact that they’re backing away from this very coercive style of quarantine is good news," said ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese… CDC officials had stressed the rules would only be used in rare circumstances when someone posed a threat and refused to cooperate. The new rules, they noted at the time, added legal protections and appeals for those subject to quarantines… 13,500 US Visas Given To People From 3 Ebola Countries
