You wake up one morning with a fever. Your joints and muscles ache. So does your head. Forget work, you go to the doctor. Your feverish brain wants to be medicated.

After a little gentle questioning, your doctor orders a quick blood test to see if you have a new type of infection, and walks away.

The doctor returns with your results — accompanied by a security guard who wears a bright green surgical mask and biohazard certified bright blue gloves. “Please come with me,” the guard insists.

“Wait…” you say, confused.

Your doctor is compassionate but firm: You will need to be isolated. You have a rare form of infection. The Centers for Disease Control and the State of Hawaii have the authority to contain anyone who has tested positive for certain illnesses to keep the public safe.

There is no going home.

A colorized micrograph of Ebola virus particles, in blue, budding from a chronically infected animal cell, in yellow-green.

National Institutes of Health

Everything will be provided to you at the quarantine facility. You can call your family from the facility, but they won’t be allowed to see you until the infection is gone — or until you are.

As you contemplate running, screaming, out of the office, a policeman behind the security guard steps forward.

In quarantine you learn the only possible treatment for your infection is experimental — it has not been tested on humans. And it might be your best chance of beating this infection and getting your life back. The mortality rate for the ailment might be as high as 90 percent.

Do you take it?

If placing you at the center of this grim saga gives it the feel of a nightmarish sci-fi movie, you should know, it isn’t. It is a plausible scenario that could happen here.

It just did in West Africa, with the resurgence of the Ebola virus.

In Hawaii, isolation and quarantine policies have been implemented to contain the spread of several different infections over the last 150 years. Starting in 1866, people who tested positive for leprosy were banished to the isolated peninsula of Kalaupapa on Molokai.

Though frightening and very lethal, relatively simple precautions can break the cycle of human-to-human transmission of the Ebola virus.

European Commission DG ECHO

Anyone who tested positive for tuberculosis in the early 1900s was sent to a sanatorium for treatment, often for months, and isolated from their loved ones as part of an attempt to stop the spread of the life-threatening disease. Leahi Hospital still stands high on the hill by Diamond Head, as a reminder of the days when TB was the scourge. Leahi was a sanatorium for island residents.

The state and federal government have the right to quarantine and isolate anyone suspected of carrying a contagious disease that is believed to place the public at risk. This is an accepted containment policy that is within the scope of public health officials to enforce. It also tends to be effective.

But with this in mind, should we have rescued two Americans infected with the Ebola virus and brought them back to the U.S.?

Not everyone thinks so.

Some people — like Donald Trump —have protested the evacuation of Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary worker Nancy Writebol from the West African nation of Liberia to Emory University in Atlanta, thinking this was the first time Ebola made it to the U.S.

But in 1989, 1990, and 1996 the virus was discovered in quarantined monkeys imported from the Philippines to our country. Luckily, there was no outbreak in humans.

Since its initial identification in 1976, scientists still don’t know how or why the Ebola virus lays dormant for years at a time, only to awaken and kill as many as nine of every 10 people who are infected by it. The current outbreak has been less lethal, killing about 60 percent of those known to be infected with it.

When one person is sick, any exposure to his or her blood or body fluids risks spreading the infection. Wearing a mask, gown, and gloves is essential, but these supplies are not always available in the places where Ebola appears.

This year alone, more than 900 people have died among the 1,600 known infections across the nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

For the two evacuated Americans, treatment mainly involves supportive care with intravenous fluids, blood products and a new experimental infusion of mouse antibodies, which so far seems to be working.

There is no cure for the Ebola virus – yet.

The first case of Ebola in West Africa was confirmed on 21 March in Guinea’s Forest region. The virus, which existed in fruit bats, rodents and monkeys in the rain forest, passed from an infected animal to a human-being and is now transmitted between people.

European Commission

It is unclear what it might cost to really respond to the threat of Ebola.

A consortium led by Scripps Research Institute in the U.S. just received a $28 million dollar grant to help find a treatment for Ebola. MAPP Biopharmaceuticals, the company in California that made the experimental vaccine that was administered to Dr. Brantly and Writebol, has been working on a treatment for more than a decade. Another company, Tekmira, is collaborating with the Department of Defense and has a $140 million dollar contract to work on a treatment for Ebola.

But there are, as of now, no plans to start trying the existing experimental drug in West Africa.

While finding human subjects to test the safety of experimental vaccines can be a challenge, that hasn’t been the case this time.

The first two recipients, Brantly and Writebol, are at Emory Hospital, and can certainly provide some early indication of the efficacy of the medication, likely in the coming days.

And, given the current public health crisis in West Africa, once a treatment is developed, testing it in endemic parts of three nations may help to expedite the drug approval process, which can take decades in the U.S.

While contracting Ebola in Africa may be considered akin to a death sentence, health officials have declared that any hospital in the U.S., using standard contact and isolation precautions, could handle such an infection without putting the general public at risk.

If the treatment for Ebola ends up being expensive, only those who can afford it will have much chance of being saved.

So, why isn’t this being done in Africa?

The World Health Organization recently dedicated $100 million to the relief effort in West Africa, in an attempt to modernize the local health care infrastructure so that it can respond to the crisis in affected countries.

That may just be a start in three impoverished countries — two are still scarred by brutal recent wars — with dismal medical infrastructure, and it is less than what is being spent in the U.S. to find an antidote for an illness that, until now, has yet to infect anyone within our borders.

It may be good that a lot of money is being spent to find a vaccine, treatment or cure in the U.S., but the greater need is in the inadequate health systems that are found wherever and whenever Ebola calls.

After all, if the treatment for Ebola ends up being expensive, only those who can afford it will have much chance of being saved.

In other words, we would be insulated from Ebola, but the people in the parts of West Africa that are hurting now — and those who risk recurrences in parts of Africa that previously endured outbreaks — could see little or no improvement.

Better health care facilities, adequate supportive medications like intravenous fluids, blood products, and isolation techniques — even without the fancy technology that we have here in the U.S. — will go a lot further than just treating the relatively few people unlucky enough to have been exposed to the virus.

Ebola outbreaks require a global response, not just to help the few people who can be evacuated, but also to aid those who call West Africa their permanent home.

If it seems hard to fathom why we should help to find a solution for a problem that is literally on the other side of the world from us, it is worth remembering that it could eventually happen here, regardless of whether or not two Americans have been brought home for treatment.

So we would do well to imagine ourselves in the skin of locals on the other side of the world.