The debate about mandatory quarantine for Ebola in the USA is a good example of how poorly the nation addresses important questions. Climate Change is a primary example. The Ebola quarantine issue is a relatively concise sample of the same thinking with many of the same political actors influencing the outcome. This also illustrates the nuances of argument provided by experts. These nuances and their motivations are important.
Many say this quarantine is motivated by politics and not supported by the medical profession. Given that one is not contagious until showing symptoms, they say that quarantine is not necessary, but the proper procedure is isolation after onset of symptoms. My common sense is that there must be a progression of the infection that brings details into this as a function of time. It cannot be an instance change to infectiousness. We need the details of the disease to address this and it is relevant to this decision. Body temperature increase is a response to the infection, so it must lag behind the increasing count of the virus in the body. Is there a short window of time in which the virus is in sweat at the surface of the skin before the body temperature increases to the declared threshold for declaring infection?
More obvious, there must be a short window of infectiousness when someone with the virus is out in the public and feels feverish and requires time to travel to home or hospital. More obvious, if the infected person is picked up by EMS personnel, those personnel are not going to be dressed in personal protective gear appropriate for handing someone infectious with Ebola.
A common response from the medical profession is to argue that quarantine will discourage medical professionals from going to Africa to combat the disease at the source (of this current outbreak). That is an argument based upon risk-benefit analysis, not purely upon the science. It is an argument that says that the benefit of going to Africa outweighs the risk of infection reaching the USA. It does not argue that there is zero risk in the USA.
For a professional to simply declare that they are safe is an oversimplification that suggests ad hoc argument that is motivated by feelings of being inconvenienced by quarantine. As some have commented, it challenges the motivations of people who travel to high-health-risk areas.
In Climate Change research, scientists decided to be very quantitative about their assessment and to publish those numbers to the public. Yes, that does leave an opportunity for deniers, but that level of detail is appropriate for so important an issue. I think the same with the Ebola outbreak.
Without the details from medical professionals, one cannot simply say that calls for quarantine are purely politically motivated.