"Health Officials Push Stronger Quarantine Law"
Associated Press (02.04.02)

 CDC HIV/STD/TB Prevention News Update
Monday, February 04, 2002
     Colorado's chief medical officer is promoting a stronger
quarantine law for infectious diseases and bioterrorism. Ned
Colange is asking for a law that allows health officials to hold
patients until they finish their medication. Colorado's current
laws permit forced isolation of infectious patients, but
according to Colange, the laws are vague and don't reflect the
urgency of drug-resistant TB. People can be kept isolated until
they are no longer infectious; then they must be released, even
if they haven't completed their full course of medication.
Colange said that there were 138 reported cases of TB in Colorado
last year, up 42 percent from the year 2000.
     Under the proposed law, to be sponsored by state Sen. Peggy
Reeves, infected people could be kept in the same health facility
where they were treated when they were infectious. Patients could
stay home under a nurse's supervision if their home and other
residents have been infected. The bill would also apply to
smallpox.

     State police would be charged with rounding up people who
flee from their quarantine. The law would work in tandem with the
state's new bioterrorism response plans to protect the public
from potentially epidemic diseases like anthrax, ebola, TB,
smallpox and plague. The mandate that each county and each acute
care hospital have bioterrorism plans in place is, in part, to
ensure that quarantine orders are enforced.