I've felt that I might have been a bit paranoid about my fears of the mixing bowl at immigration at JFK Terminal 1(see earlier posts). But the travel odyssey through major airports of our first US case (see: http://www.wtop.com/41/3713787/Man-with-Ebola-flew-through-DC-airport) makes me feel justified.

In this his case, the wisdom is that "no symptoms, no contagion." Assuming that to be true, it was by pure, dumb luck.

The number of potential exposures if he had been "contagious" and made the same trip through the same airports, with the wait times describe in the article, is astounding. The numbers of people exposed, and then exposed by them simply "blow up" as my mathematically inclined friends say.

IMO, the idea, as is being implemented now, of tracing all contacts and isolating them, would have been both mathematically and practically impossible to implement had this, quite possibly, been the case.

I think that the boarding of international airlines need to be our first line of defense: I don't think we can afford to wait until a passenger has passed through the system of several airports and catch them at the end of the journey and find they are (possibly) contagious. Passengers need to be screened at the start, and if there is any possibility of exposure, denied boarding until medically cleared: even if it takes the 21 days incubation period to be sure.