From USA Today, April 1, 2010:
Obama administration scraps quarantine regulations
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.
All this would not have happened if these people were diligent. A bit more:
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.
And the latest press release from the ACLU? Anything? Anyone? Bueller?
The ACLU does have a legitimate reason for existing but crap like this is not it. This is serious overstepping their grounds and the consequences are fatal.
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