Just because someone has been evacuated and they are living in a shelter doesn't mean they pose a health risk to others in the community. These folks shouldn't be stigmatized with that. |
Our purpose now is to reach into the medical community just to make sure nobody out there has any symptoms. There is an incubation window of one to six days, but we still want to get this information into clinicians' hands. |
The whole idea is that if we ever had an emergency situation - say it involved smallpox - we would be able, whatever the location, to augment what states could do. |
We are seeing some cases. It could be life-threatening. |
We pretty much feel there is no public health threat here. We just wanted to alert the medical community to watch out for cases. |
We're starting to hear reports that some of the folks evacuated could cause potential health risks to the cities they've gone into. |