From the Associated Press News Service:
"PHOENIX (AP) - Behind the county hospital’s tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps germs from escaping. Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. It is considered virtually untreatable."
It will be the diseases that killed thousands of people in the early 20th century. It will be the very diseases that a triumphant modernist worldview proclaimed conquered. It will be diseases that we thought we had a cure for that will turn on us and end our world as we know it. A truly infectious, communicable disease where only true isolation can slow the spread. The military knows that you never leave a viable enemy behind your lines and we have known for generations that where prolific organisms have a survival rate that is not equal to zero that tolerant populations arise. That is what has happened.
So what do you do when a person shows up whose actual existence is a threat to humanity? SF has worked this plot over and over but it would appear that we are rapidly approaching the point where here and now, in a society defined by its cult of the individual and the rights of the individual over the majority, that we will have to start making: a) decisions to isolate people indefinitely for the sole reason that we cannot cure the chronic infectious disease that they carry or b) even worse (think "Outbreak").
What would Jesus do indeed.
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