Will Airport Ebola Screenings Be Effective? (false positives...)

Will Airport Ebola Screenings Be Effective?

Five U.S. airports will screen for the disease by taking travelers' temperatures.

Larry Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, is also skeptical.  "Fever screening can be unobtrusive, but let's not have the false impression that this is a tried-and-true method and it's going to keep Ebola out of the United States," he said. The practice could ultimately wasting the airport staff's time. Gostin said that a passenger with vertigo drew attention to airport authorities for hours, only to find that the emergency was a false positive. To Gostin, cases like that are a testament to a waste of efforts to appease a panicked public. "There's a lot of pressure to do something [to] make the public feel reassured, even if it really doesn't make them safer," he said.