Airport Ebola Screens Designed to Fail

It is pretty hard to trust or admire our government on a good day.

However, this is more of a theoretical concern than a practical one, since they haven't had a whole lot of them lately.

In July alone, workers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stumbled across an unsecured box of smallpox, which had been sitting around in a storage room for decades. Shortly thereafter, a different group managed to send out live anthrax (it was supposed to be dead) to research labs resulting in dozens of scientists being exposed, and subsequently treated with antibiotics.

Ironically, only two months earlier, the CDC was participating in an ongoing debate about whether to destroy the "last" remaining sample of smallpox. Maybe they ought to put that on hold for awhile.

At the time, CDC director "Clueless Tom Frieden" (no relation to Shoeless Joe Jackson), who has led the agency since 2009, cleared this up: “We missed the broader pattern.” I don't know what this means, but I suspect it is government speak for "We really f######ed this up, but it's not my fault."

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