The Los Angeles Times explains [4] 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 [5]:
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 [6]. “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.