Public safety first

I cannot see why some dogmatic human rights advocates are raising quarantine as a human rights issue.

To be sure, quarantine is an inconvenience. No one – if it can be helped – would want to be subjected to it.

And there could not be such a thing as voluntary quarantine. People suspected of contagious infection do not have a choice whether to go into quarantine or not.

When a doctor orders you to be confined, those are orders better followed for the good of everyone. A doctor does not normally require a court order to bring a patient to confinement.

Generals and presidents bow to doctor’s orders. That is the dictate of expertise, the mandate of competence.

Quarantine is doctor’s orders. It is imposed usually on substantial medical grounds.

Quarantine is an inconvenience for the quarantined as much as it is an inconvenience for those who order it. I have yet to hear a case where quarantine was deemed entirely whimsical. There has to be compelling scientific reason for isolation to be ordered.

Quarantine has legal basis too. There is such a thing as a Quarantine Law – Republic Act 123 signed way back in 1947.

Some legislators are now looking at the possibility of passing a new law with more teeth. That new law will further empower the authorities to confine individuals or entire communities suspected of infection.

Our lawmakers are now looking at tough procedures being followed by Chinese authorities in the cases of people suspected of being infected by SARS. We might have to replicate such procedures should suspected SARS cases here continue to rise.

The human rights issue regarding quarantine was occasioned by the isolation of entire villages in Alcala, Pangasinan. The isolation of these villages were ordered after investigation revealed extensive casual contacts with a SARS victim carrying the virus from Canada.

Not surprisingly, the isolated villagers are extremely inconvenienced. The local government was unprepared to look after their needs. Few wanted to enter the isolated villages for fear of contamination. There was, too, the scarlet letter of prejudice against the isolated villagers.

It was discovered, the other day, that some of the villagers of Alcala broke the quarantine and ventured to the town to buy provisions. That alarmed the President, no less, who ordered her law enforcement officials to look into the legality of sanctioning those who break quarantine.

As I mentioned in the previous column, we have no idea at this point about the final magnitude of the epidemic we now confront. The virus has to be fully identified. No antidote has yet been found. The method of transmission from person to person is unclear. The symptoms are not uniform from case to case.

Against this deadly virus, every precaution must be taken to avert rapid contamination of a larger swath of the population. Among the precautions taken is to quarantine individuals and entire communities if that is medically advised.

There is, quite obviously, no persecution intended in wholesale quarantine. There is no political motive here either. They are not being punished for a crime.

The authorities have ordered quarantine for the sake of the greater public good.

To raise quarantine as a human rights issue is therefore totally misplaced.

The reason why political orders exist is to establish the means by which the general good may be safeguarded even if that requires restricting the normal freedom of others. The reason political authority exists is to determine what public safety requires and act on that accordingly.

Without unduly exaggerating the threat, it must be recognized that the SARS epidemic threatens our entire national community. If this virus spreads unimpeded, it could bring all of us to ruin. Or bring all of us to death.

Remember, in the recent past, we collected all the lepers and deported them to a distant colony. That prevented the spread of leprosy, sparing the rest of the community from this disease.

Too bad, the lepers had to be forcibly isolated in the name of public safety. At that time, before the age of "political correctness", no pig-headed do-gooder raised a human rights case against the permanent quarantine of lepers. Instead, the goodhearted donated funds and food and other conveniences to make the life of lepers less miserable even if they needed to endure isolation to protect the rest of us from a dreadful affliction.

Sometimes, it seems that "political correctness" is the more enduring threat to public safety.

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I think I found a stalker of sorts in the person of someone named Al Yu who has been quite diligent in contributing to the Inbox section.

Normally, this should be flattering even as he constantly disagrees with me. But this particular stalker is distinctly unsatisfying.

Al Yu does not engage in honest debate and seems chronically incapable of intellectual integrity. He deliberately misinterprets what I write to fit his rigid perspective. By doing so, he sows confusion among readers of this section.

That is unfair to the readers.

Last Thursday, for instance, Mr. Yu wrote "Alex Magno admits Saddam’s hidden dungeons were nothing more than a myth…"

That is an absolute lie. Regular readers of this column will recall I wrote about that poignant scene on television where a group of Iraqis claimed they heard voices of missing relatives from inside a well. Those relatives were victims of involuntary disappearances during Saddam’s cruel rule. Tens of thousands disappeared during this period.

There was no dungeon under that particular well. But there were numerous prison camps with dungeons that were uncovered. Iraqis in search of missing relatives have invaded prison camps and the press has covered these torture chambers, mass graves and dungeons rather extensively.

Debating with pig-headed fanatics is easy. Their logic is stilted and their grasp of reality shallow. But this Mr. Yu is worse than a fanatic. He is afflicted with incurable mental dishonesty.