Poll: Most Residents Would Yield Rights

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-flupoll1117.artnov17,0,5633940.story

Poll: Most Residents Would Yield Rights
Unity Seen In A Flu Crisis

By GARRET CONDON
Courant Staff Writer

November 17 2005

A new Hartford Courant/University of Connecticut Poll suggests that most Connecticut residents would give up some freedom to help curb a killer flu. Such civic-mindedness could make all the difference if officials order quarantines, the laws for which have been retooled to anticipate the natural and man-made disease threats of the post-9/11 world. A telephone survey conducted this month found 85 percent of those polled said government should have the authority to enforce quarantines in affected areas in the event of an influenza pandemic. Most (71 percent) also said they believe that government officials should be able to require citizens to be vaccinated against a deadly flu strain. Although most state residents seem content to let the government take command in an influenza crisis, slightly more than half are unimpressed with the current state of government preparation, and 62 percent believe vaccine makers must be liable for the harmful side effects of vaccines. Overall, most respondents (70 percent), said they're closely following news stories about a possible flu pandemic.

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Samuel Best, director of UConn's Center for Survey Research & Analysis, which conducted the new poll, said that the mixed message from the public showed a nuanced understanding of the issues. "The public is being very wise about this," he said. He added that he was not surprised that there was wide support for the use of quarantine in a flu emergency. Earlier polling, he said, showed similar support for the Patriot Act. "Faced with a crisis, people are willing to step aside and give the government special power," he said.

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Gene Matthews is director of the Atlanta-based Institute of Public Health Law of the non-profit CDC Foundation and was the general counsel for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1979 to 2004. He said that after the events of 2001, the CDC encouraged states to review their quarantine laws, some of which had been unchanged since the 1930s. Matthews said the idea was to revise the laws to prepare for 21st-century threats and to update the laws with regard to key legal principles, such as due process. In late 2001, the CDC contracted with the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities to create the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, a kind of template that legislatures could use to help revise laws related to public health emergencies. According to the center, 44 states - including Connecticut - have adopted language identical or similar to the wording of the model act.

In Connecticut, the General Assembly acted in 2003 to greatly expand the state's power to use quarantine during a declared public health emergency. It also spelled out the legal framework for such actions. Before the law was changed, only individuals could be quarantined, Cartter said. Under the new law, if the governor declares a public health emergency, health officials would be able, for example, to quarantine all of the passengers on an airplane arriving from a pandemic flu-afflicted city. Previously, the local public health director would have had to write a separate isolation or quarantine order for each passenger.

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but quarantine can be effective. I don't see it as an infringement on my liberty, though. I'm old enough to remember being in quarantine for measels, mumps, and viral pneumonia. The pneumonia lingered for an entire summer, and I couldn't go outside or be with my friends. But I understood that if they came around they could get sick, and I didn't want anyone to get as sick as I was. I was 6 at the time.

But I always have a horrible reaction to shots. I'd rather take my chances with alternatives, which is what I'm doing now.