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Why Screening for Ebola By Taking Temperature CAN’T Work

George Washington's picture




 

The Los Angeles Times explains why trying to screen Ebola victims by taking their temperature won’t work:

A person could pass body temperature checks performed at the airports by taking ibuprofen or any common analgesic. And prospective passengers have much to fear from identifying themselves as sick, said Kim Beer, a resident of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, who is working to get medical supplies into the country to cope with Ebola.

 

“It is highly unlikely that someone would acknowledge having a fever, or simply feeling unwell,” Beer said via email. “Not only will they probably not get on the flight — they may even be taken to/required to go to a ‘holding facility’ where they would have to stay for days until it is confirmed that it is not caused by Ebola. That is just about the last place one would want to go.

 

***

 

The potential disincentive for passengers to reveal their own symptoms was echoed by Sheka Forna, a dual citizen of Sierra Leone and Britain who manages a communications firm in Freetown. Forna said he considered it “very possible” that people with fever would medicate themselves to appear asymptomatic.

 

It would be perilous to admit even nonspecific symptoms at the airport, Forna said in a telephone interview. “You’d be confined to wards with people with full-blown disease.”

In other words, Ebola carriers who fail to take something to lower their temperature are signing their own death warrants.

The incentive to cheat is so high – life or death – that testing through temperature alone is totally worthless.

In addition, even the Centers for Disease Control admits that thermal scanners often fail.  As the Guardian reports:

Checking body temperature isn’t a sure-fire way to find individuals infected with Ebola. People can carry the virus for up to three weeks before showing symptoms, and are not contagious during that period. The patient in the US case, Thomas Eric Duncan, was reportedly asymptomatic when he travelled from Liberia to Dallas.

 

In a guidance paper produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for airport and public health officials, the agency lists what it sees as problems with the devices, including cost, lack of precision, need for frequent calibration and maintenance and training requirements. Testing efficacy to judge the scanners write large is difficult because of the many and changing models available.

 

While such scanners can be good at ruling out people without fevers, the CDC said, they have a wide and varying range of efficacy at finding people with fevers depending on environmental conditions and even the age of the person being scanned. The FDA approved the devices for use only with more conventional methods of taking someone’s temperature, such as a mercury thermometer or color-changing strips.

 

“Policy makers may feel some pressure to use [non-contact infrared thermometers],” said French researchers at the Institut de Veille Sanitaire. “But the decision making process should not ignore the poor scientific evidence on NCIT’s efficacy to delay the introduction of a novel influenza strain.”

 

“The psychological reassuring effect on the public can influence the decision to implement such screening, as was the case in Singapore and Canada,” said the same study from Institut de Veille Sanitaire. “But these countries also recognised that the public may lose confidence in this measure if an undetected case had entered the country and generated secondary cases.”

In other words, thermal scanners are really just for show ... and the public is going to catch on and become disillusioned pretty quickly.

 

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Sat, 10/11/2014 - 19:15 | 5319110 Money Squid
Money Squid's picture

pssssst George, click on my contact request. I have secret info to share. ssssshhhhhh

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 21:48 | 5312095 williambanzai7
williambanzai7's picture

Meanwhile, the airport temperature screens certainly did serve as an added travel deterrent during the SARS outbreak in Asia, the first being no one wanted to step inside an airplane fearing contamination.

And as I recall quite a number of people were taken from Chiangi Airport straight to the Quarantine.

Sat, 10/11/2014 - 19:16 | 5319117 Money Squid
Money Squid's picture

Ebola pffffftttt wake me when its radioactive Ebola

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 21:39 | 5312047 Aussiekiwi
Aussiekiwi's picture

Bullish respirators, I bet searches for respirators on EBAY just spiked.

Temperature screening, good one, catch a cold and end up in a ward with people with Ebola.....nice.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 20:07 | 5311606 limacon
limacon's picture

See where the real control lies :

https://www.academia.edu/8713304/Ebola_and_Insurance

 

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 19:51 | 5311540 q99x2
q99x2's picture

My ex-wife is immune to ebola and every other virus that needs a human host.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 21:59 | 5312154 Reaper
Reaper's picture

The joke's all on those who trust their government and the CDC. Your last laugh is their delight.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 19:31 | 5311454 Reaper
Reaper's picture

All rational people know the government hacks are deliberating doing that which they know will not work and which will harm Americans. This is a criminal act made with malice aforethought. Do they believe stupidity and their inadequate college educations are a defense?

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 22:52 | 5312309 Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed's picture

don't know what "they" believe, but I believe that anyone with a head stuffed full of PC and a public school education has low odds of survival.  That phrase too stupid to live takes on a new meaning...

Ahhh,.. but let's let evolution do it's work.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 19:21 | 5311403 divide_by_zero
divide_by_zero's picture

Like the rest of the US .gov, this administration has reduced the CDC to a hack partisan tool.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 18:38 | 5311209 Rastadamus
Rastadamus's picture

BULLISH ON BIBLES, KORANS, UPANISHADS.....

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 18:13 | 5311106 yellowsub
yellowsub's picture

Are they expecting the people working for TSA making $15/hr to screen people when they think need to re-examine and test a breast pump as a explosive device?!

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 19:20 | 5311400 disabledvet
disabledvet's picture

Especially when your getting hundred million dollar kickbacks from the folks who have levered that airport 100/1.

"Better keep those planes flying!"

Seriously...screening for a blood borne pathogen because of fever is pretty stupid. You can have Ebola but because you aren't sick yet no one knows.

ONE STRAND IS SUFFICIENT TO KILL YOU.

Good luck detecting that.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 18:10 | 5311094 foxmuldar
foxmuldar's picture

Enterovirus, Eboalitis and Obamaitis continues to fund raise. Weekend is soon upon us. Can we skip the breafings so I can make it to the course on time. 

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 19:22 | 5311412 disabledvet
disabledvet's picture

"I'm sure I can pay my way out of this...just pike the Clintons."

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 16:50 | 5310611 Gunga
Gunga's picture

There comes a point at which you can no longer attribute continual harmful acts to incompetence but must realize that the harmful acts are willful malice.

We must realize that the constant and continuing injurious actions comitted by the US Federal government on the American people is intentional and meant to harm.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 16:59 | 5310675 Citxmech
Citxmech's picture

IDK - I question the premise that there are limits to human stupidity.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

- A. Einstein

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 16:26 | 5310454 limacon
limacon's picture

It wouldn't have worked for the Black Death : See

http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2005/08/black-death.html


The profile of the Black Death :
Latent Period from time of infection : 10 - 12 days
Infectious period (after latent period)before the appearance of symptoms : 20 - 22 days Incubation period before symptoms ( sum of above) : approx 32 days Average period displaying symptoms before death : 5 days Total infectious period : approx 22 + 5 = 27 days Time to death from infection : approx 37 days .

Ebola profile :

Ebola has 2-21 ,(usually 10 ) days before symptoms , but it is infectious during this period (Black Death infectious for 10-12 days before symptoms) . Time to death 5-7 days after symptoms if untreated .

 

 

 

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 22:45 | 5312350 Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed's picture

Yes, that failure to detect fever CANNOT rule out infection has been known from the beginning.  The average American's inability to reason is almost more frightening than the ebola virus.

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 15:05 | 5310027 Trudy Rendel
Trudy Rendel's picture

A simple mathematical analysis attacking screening: http://ebolapost.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/19/

Thu, 10/09/2014 - 16:56 | 5310647 Citxmech
Citxmech's picture

Ahhh, the tradgedy of unintended consiquences.

Cue Billy from Predator:

Billy: I'm scared Poncho. 
Poncho: Bullshit. You ain't afraid of no man. 
Billy: There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man. . .  We're all gonna die.

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