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Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227095.900-can-airport-technology-halt-a-pandemic.html
Can airport technology halt a pandemic?
* 25 May 2009 by Paul Marks
WHEN aviation officials chose Mexico City for a meeting to discuss their response to pandemic outbreaks, they could scarcely have predicted swine flu would intervene. "The irony was amazing," says Tony Evans of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal, Canada. "The meeting will probably go ahead in June unless we get another wave of H1N1."
Future pandemics will almost certainly be spread via air travel, with flights capable of carrying a pathogen across the world in hours. The UN's Convention on International Civil Aviation requires nations to "prevent the spread of communicable diseases by means of air navigation". That is easier said than done, especially in poorer regions.
Enter CAPSCA - the Cooperative Arrangement for the Prevention of the Spread of Communicable diseases by Air travel. CAPSCA aims to help airports in developing nations prepare for a pandemic, and its schemes are now getting off the ground in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa.
"When an aircraft arrives with a suspected disease case on board, CAPSCA will make sure you've thought about where you are going to park the plane, how you will deal with the luggage and how are you going to keep in touch with the passengers that haven't got any symptoms," Evans says. You also have to work out which people on the plane are most likely to be infected and whether they need prophylactic treatment or admission to hospital. How will you protect customs officers? Careful planning is crucial and CAPSCA will promote that, Evans explains.
At present these plans rely on aircrew identifying any sick passengers by their symptoms. It would be far better to have an automatic system that can detect infected people as they pass through a gate or wander around an airport, but there is still no reliable technology to do that.
Since the SARS scare in 2003, some airports have used infrared cameras to pinpoint passengers with high temperatures, Turkey spotted its first swine flu case this way. It is an imperfect solution, however, because different viruses are infectious at different stages: flu is infectious about a day before fever arrives, whereas with SARS the two coincide. "So cameras were better at picking up SARS cases before an infected person got on a plane," Evans says.
Ideally, he'd like to see a test that reveals when somebody is infected before they even develop symptoms - perhaps based on a breath test. But such technology remains far-off.
One infection-spotting technique that might be practical in the near future is the cough detector. Biorics, a spin-off from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, is hoping to use cheap networks of microphones in airports to detect and locate people with persistent coughs. The firm has developed software that by analysing the pattern of frequencies can tell the difference between someone merely clearing their throat and a sickly cough. Once a cougher has been detected, the microphone array can then be used to triangulate their position and identify them, perhaps with the aid of CCTV, so they can then be checked for infection.
Can airport technology halt a pandemic?
* 25 May 2009 by Paul Marks
WHEN aviation officials chose Mexico City for a meeting to discuss their response to pandemic outbreaks, they could scarcely have predicted swine flu would intervene. "The irony was amazing," says Tony Evans of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal, Canada. "The meeting will probably go ahead in June unless we get another wave of H1N1."
Future pandemics will almost certainly be spread via air travel, with flights capable of carrying a pathogen across the world in hours. The UN's Convention on International Civil Aviation requires nations to "prevent the spread of communicable diseases by means of air navigation". That is easier said than done, especially in poorer regions.
Enter CAPSCA - the Cooperative Arrangement for the Prevention of the Spread of Communicable diseases by Air travel. CAPSCA aims to help airports in developing nations prepare for a pandemic, and its schemes are now getting off the ground in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa.
"When an aircraft arrives with a suspected disease case on board, CAPSCA will make sure you've thought about where you are going to park the plane, how you will deal with the luggage and how are you going to keep in touch with the passengers that haven't got any symptoms," Evans says. You also have to work out which people on the plane are most likely to be infected and whether they need prophylactic treatment or admission to hospital. How will you protect customs officers? Careful planning is crucial and CAPSCA will promote that, Evans explains.
At present these plans rely on aircrew identifying any sick passengers by their symptoms. It would be far better to have an automatic system that can detect infected people as they pass through a gate or wander around an airport, but there is still no reliable technology to do that.
Since the SARS scare in 2003, some airports have used infrared cameras to pinpoint passengers with high temperatures, Turkey spotted its first swine flu case this way. It is an imperfect solution, however, because different viruses are infectious at different stages: flu is infectious about a day before fever arrives, whereas with SARS the two coincide. "So cameras were better at picking up SARS cases before an infected person got on a plane," Evans says.
Ideally, he'd like to see a test that reveals when somebody is infected before they even develop symptoms - perhaps based on a breath test. But such technology remains far-off.
One infection-spotting technique that might be practical in the near future is the cough detector. Biorics, a spin-off from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, is hoping to use cheap networks of microphones in airports to detect and locate people with persistent coughs. The firm has developed software that by analysing the pattern of frequencies can tell the difference between someone merely clearing their throat and a sickly cough. Once a cougher has been detected, the microphone array can then be used to triangulate their position and identify them, perhaps with the aid of CCTV, so they can then be checked for infection.