WANT TO AVOID THE FLU WHILE FLYING? TRY A WINDOW SEAT
YORK» Worried about catching NEW a cold or the flu on an airplane? Get a window seat, and don’t leave it until the flight is over.
That’s what some experts have been saying for years, and it’s perhaps the best advice from a new attempt to determine the risks of catching germs on an airplane.
There has been little research on the risks of catching a cold or flu during air travel. Some experts believed that sitting in a window seat would keep a passenger away from infectious people who may be on the aisle or moving around.
The new study, published Monday, came to the same conclusion.
For somebody who doesn’t want to get sick, “get in that window seat, and don’t move,” the study’s lead researcher, Vicki Stover Hertzberg of Emory University.
The study was ambitious: Squads of researchers jetted around the U.S. to test cabin surfaces and air for viruses and to observe how people came into contact with each other.
The study was initiated and funded by Boeing. The Chicago-based jet manufacturer also recruited one of the researchers, Georgia Tech’s Howard Weiss, and had input in the writing of the results. “But there was no particular pressure to change stuff or orient it one way or the other,” Hertzberg said.
The researchers did some mathematical modeling and computer simulations to determine how likely people were to come close to a hypothetical infectious passenger sitting in an aisle seat on the 14th row of a single-aisle airplane. They concluded that on average, only one person on a flight of about 150 passengers would be infected. ●●●