Colorado Health Officials Push Stronger Quarantine Law

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.

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