CDC seeks tighter quarantine rules
Federal health officials are seeking to update quarantine regulations, hoping to better protect Americans from foreign infectious diseases including bird flu. The proposed changes, announced this week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, include easier CDC access to airline and ship passenger lists, a clearer appeals process for people subjected to quarantines, and explicit authority to offer vaccinations and medical treatment to quarantined people.
The changes are part of a multipronged attempt to guard against infectious agents from abroad. In the past 1½ years, the CDC also has increased the number of quarantine stations at airports, ship ports, and land-border crossings from eight to 18.
Concerns about a potentially deadly bird flu immigrating from Asia are among the motivators for the change, said Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine. Health officials fear bird flu could spark a pandemic should it mutate into a form easily passed from human to human.
CDC officials say federal quarantine and contact-tracing regulations are antiquated. This is the first substantial overhaul in at least 25 years, they said. The need for new regulations was made clear during international outbreaks of the SARS virus in 2003, when public health officials had difficulty getting passenger information from airlines to trace the contacts of people who had been infected, Cetron said.
"SARS put it really front and center where the gaps were," he said.
One proposal would require airlines and cruise lines to maintain passenger and crew lists and submit them electronically to the CDC upon request. Katherine Andrus, assistant general counsel for the Air Transport Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade organization, said her group is still reviewing the proposal and its costs. Airlines want to protect their customers' privacy, but they don't expect much protest from passengers if providing the information helps contain an epidemic, she added.
Another proposal would set forth the legal rights of a person placed under quarantine, including the right to request a hearing. Some legal scholars said such guidelines have been missing from federal law, and their absence could lead to a legal tangle that might stall government quarantine actions during an outbreak.
The rules were being published in the Federal Register and will be open for public comment for 60 days. CDC officials say they hope to make the regulations final by next spring.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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