Relax! TSA will screen for Ebola in airports

The best you can say about this is that we're probably seeing a panic/overreaction to a handful of Ebola cases in the U.S., which is not to say we shouldn't be taking the situation seriously - but at least as of now we're probably not going to pay too high a price for federal agencies' inability to do what they're pondering.

And you'll love what they're pondering, especially if you travel much. You think the TSA abuses its power by confiscating your shaving gel and contact solution? How will it screen for Ebola? And who will it screen? As of this moment, it has no idea:

"All options are on the table for further strengthening the screening process here in the U.S.," a federal official said. That includes thermometer checks for fever, something West African authorities are already carrying out. But finding the right passengers to screen is not so simple. Direct flights from Ebola-affected areas are rare. Travelers typically take flights that connect through other countries. "Then they come here, so that makes it more of a challenge," the official said.

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Mukpo, who worked for NBC, is not representative of that challenge. He was diagnosed on Thursday in Liberia and left there on a specially-equipped plane on Sunday. But another patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, may be. To fly from Monrovia, Liberia, the country hit hardest by the epidemic, to Dallas, Texas, where he lies in an isolation unit in critical condition, he had to connect. But even if Duncan had undergone a temperature screening, it would have turned up negative, and he would have made it into the country undetected.

I will say this in fairness to the federal government: I don't know if it's even possible to do what people seem to want, which is to put up some sort of virtual wall that keeps a virus - which can be carried by anyone pretty much undetected - out of an entire country. I understand why people want that to happen, given the potential of Ebola to spread once it's here (which it clearly already is), but short of stopping everyone at Customs and conducting some sort of foolproof Ebola screening on the spot, how could you possibly achieve it? Ebola is only going to be controlled by effective quarantines and treatments.There's no way you can stop every one of 300-plus million people from getting infected. The best we can say is that we've yet to see the health panic that ultimately overran the country the way people always fear. Strategies are developed based on the reality on the ground and we contain it - not perfectly and not sufficient to save everyone, but ultimately we get the situation under control because we still have the best health care system and the best health care professionals in the world. ObamaCare hasn't ruined it yet. Give it time. It would be nice if the media would exercise some degree of restraint in the way it reports individual cases, but good luck with that. Here in my backyard the local media went into a tizzy just because someone showed up in the ER with a few Ebola-like symptoms, and who can say if the patient's decision to go to the ER in the first place might have been influenced by the media's Ebola obsession in the first place? It's a vicious circle, friends. Back to the TSA, I actually don't fault the agency for not having a clue how to screen for Ebola. I don't think there is a way. But I do fault people who constantly feed the notion that the federal government is supposed to come up with an answer to every problem that occurs in life. That's what leads them to try stuff like this, which has no hope of succeeding but will suck up lots of resources and inconvenience a lot of people in the process.