This story caught my eye. Apparently a man in Phoenix is being detained and quarantined in a prison hospital ward because he has admitted to not taking precautions to keep himself from spreading a untreatable strain of tuberculosis called XDR-TB. It seems strange because the article states he has not been charged with a crime. From the article:
Though Daniels' confinement is extremely rare, health experts say it is a situation that U.S. public health officials may have to confront more and more because of the spread of drug-resistant TB and the emergence of diseases such as SARS and avian flu in this increasingly interconnected world.
"Drug-resistant TB, or drug-resistant staph infections, or pandemic flu will raise these questions again," Caplan said. "We may find ourselves dipping into our history to answer them."
it seems to me that this issue of detaining "infected" individuals is a very tricky one indeed with the likelihood of abuse/misuse very high.
http://my.earthlink.net/article/nat?guid=20070402/46107fc0_3ca6_15526200704021514260534
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