CDC's Ebola message is narrower than airport panic, because in its May 22 transcript the agency said people do not get Ebola by passing someone in an airport or sitting near someone briefly; the risk is direct contact with blood or body fluids from a person who is sick with Ebola. [1]

The paper's May 31 account of Bundibugyo screening staying in clinician hands argued for service language over drama, and Monday's brief keeps that discipline by separating a travel-monitoring system from the social-media fantasy that every terminal, gate, shuttle line or seat row becomes a transmission zone.

The traveler system is still real, since CDC says travelers from designated affected areas are routed through four American airports, screened, and monitored after arrival, but that is a way to identify symptoms, route follow-up, preserve contact information and keep a 21-day clock visible rather than evidence that casual proximity is dangerous. [2]

The distinction matters for ordinary behavior: a person worried because they changed planes near a stranger needs a different answer from a clinician evaluating a fever, recent travel, sick contact or direct exposure history, and Ebola is frightening enough without giving casual contact a power CDC does not assign to it. [1] [2]

Public-health language fails when it either minimizes the disease or inflates the route of transmission, and CDC's useful contribution here is to keep both truths together: the virus is severe, but the airport crowd is not itself the exposure.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago