[justin66]

> And given the level of equipment and training the military have with regard to doing their job while wearing full Nuclear/Biological/Chemical protection. I would honestly prefer that if the situation escalates and we see confirmation of airborne transmission, the situation be dealt with by prompt deployment of fully NBC trained military medical units and sufficient security forces to ensure that whatever those doctors say is law within the quarantine.

I don't think the people speculating here understand how bloody military quarantine imposed by a foreign power could be - however well intentioned - compared to the mere 2,200 people who have died of the disease so far.

Send in a U.S. Marine division of 20,000 people (or maybe make it a "coalition" and send in a few hundred European troops as well to, ahem, share the burden) and tell them that they need to direct some people from one place to another, keep some people penned up, keep all these people fed, keep them from doing anything unfriendly to the nice doctors in the space suits, and everyone who resists - resistance here includes rioting or just not being able to follow instructions because, you know, the troops don't speak the language - needs to be taken into custody with that legendary marine gentleness while being treated as a potentially lethal disease carrier. Keep the troops mindful that if they err on the side of laxity they could get a disease that might cause them to die bleeding from their bodily orifices.

Multiple massacres should be the expected outcome of such an operation. The projected cost of the disease needs to pretty horrible before it becomes worth contemplating such a high-risk, low-reward action and we'd want to exhaust all other means of supplying these countries' civil authorities with what they need before we took such a step. We haven't done that yet.