U. S. lacks plan to handle contagious diseases in the air
When it comes to a comprehensive plan to prevent and contain the spread of diseases through air travel, America is not ready. ❚ That’s the conclusion the U. S. Government Accountability Office reached in 2015. ❚ It still holds true. A series of outbreaks over the past 15 years hammered home the link between air travel and communicable diseases: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ( SARS) in 2003, swine flu in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, among
others.
“If you’re in aviation, you’re in the infection control business. The volume of air travel is just so vast,” said Mark Gendreau, chief medical officer of Beverly and Addison Gilbert Hospitals in Massachusetts and one of the first to study the spread of infectious disease on aircrafts.
When airlines serving the USA carried a record 932 million passengers, and the global total reached almost 3.7 billion, the GAO’s report found numerous examples of poor coordination on communicable diseases.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials complained that the information on sick passengers they receive from airlines and the control tower often is incomplete or inaccurate.
Cleaning crews said cabin staff sometimes fail to inform them when a plane has been contaminated by blood, vomit, feces, saliva and other potentially infectious bodily fluids.
Airline workers complained about the cleaners; one said, “Cabin cleaners sometimes use the same towels to clean potentially infectious materials and later to clean food service equipment such as coffeemakers.”
Lisa Rotz, CDC associate director for global health and migration, conceded that stopping diseases from spreading via air travel is a huge challenge.
Even passengers who know they are sick often board planes rather than postponing plans.
“I would say it’s difficult to prevent completely,” Rotz said, “but there are a lot of things we can do to mitigate.”