United States Airports on alert over virus
Three US airports will screen passengers arriving from central China for a new virus that has sickened dozens of people, killed two and prompted worries about an international outbreak.
US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials will begin taking temperatures and asking about the symptoms of passengers who have travelled on direct flights from the outbreak city of Wuhan.
Officials estimate that roughly 5000 passengers will go through the process in the next two weeks at New York City’s Kennedy airport and the Los Angeles and San Francisco airports.
Doctors began seeing a new type of viral pneumonia – involving fever, cough and difficulty breathing – in people who worked at or had visited a food market in the suburbs of Wuhan late last month.
More than 45 cases of the newly identified coronavirus have been confirmed in Asia, most of them in Wuhan, including two deaths.
Officials have said that the virus probably spread from animals to people, but they haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that it can spread from person to person.
So far, the risk to the American public is deemed to be low. However, the CDC wanted to be prepared and was taking precautions, spokesman Dr Martin Cetron said.
‘‘The earlier we detect a case, the better we can protect the public, and the more we can understand about this virus and its risk for spread,’’ he said.
The CDC is sending 100 staff to handle the airport screenings. Passengers who seem like they might be infected will undergo testing for flu or other possible causes.
The plan is to place them in isolation at a nearby hospital until doctors know what they’re dealing with, to prevent the possible spread of the new virus.
Specialised testing for the virus could take a day to get results, CDC officials said.
Passengers who don’t have symptoms will be handed cards that tell who to contact for health care if they develop symptoms later.
At least half a dozen countries in Asia have started screening incoming airline passengers from central China. The list includes Thailand and Japan, which both have reported cases of the disease in people who had come from Wuhan.
Travel is unusually heavy at the moment as people take trips to and from China to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
The CDC said the airport screenings were part of an effort to better detect and prevent the virus from the same family of bugs that caused an international outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) that began in 2002 and 2012.
The CDC did not screen incoming passengers during those outbreaks, and some public health experts are questioning whether they should do so now.
‘‘It’s not a particularly effective intervention, and it potentially offers a false sense of security,’’ said Dr Kamran Khan, a University of Toronto researcher who has studied airport screenings during the SARS and Ebola outbreaks.
He said screeners were likely to flag a lot of people with other germs – it is flu season in the northern hemisphere – while missing infections from the new virus.
Experts believe it may take up to two weeks between the time someone is infected and when they come down with a fever and other symptoms.
The only other time the CDC has done airport screenings was in 2014, when officials screened thousands of passengers from three West African countries for Ebola but detected no cases. One passenger who was infected but had no symptoms passed through the screenings and developed symptoms after arriving in the US.
Health authorities identified the bug this month as a new type of coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, some of which cause the common cold. Others found in bats, camels and other animals have evolved into more severe illnesses.
SARS belongs to the coronavirus family, but Chinese state media say the illness in Wuhan is different from coronaviruses that have been identified in the past. Earlier laboratory tests ruled out SARS and MERS as well as influenza, bird flu and other common lung-infecting germs.
CDC officials said they were not certain if China had begun screening passengers before they boarded planes to travel abroad.