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Screening Airplane Passengers Unlikely to Halt Pandemic Spread
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aMd5cXJZxU1w
By John Lauerman
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Screening sick airplane passengers to find those infected with flu is unlikely to stop the spread of a pandemic virus, researchers said after studying flight passengers during the SARS epidemic.
Patients with symptoms that suggested they had the SARS virus turned out to have a wide variety of infections, said researchers led by Luciano Kleber de Souza Luna of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Less than half of 155 patients studied were carrying identifiable germs, the researchers said.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, a viral lung disease, spread from China around the globe in 2003, infecting about 8,000 people and killing 774 of them. One of the lessons of the effort to control the disease is the difficulty of picking out patients with specific lung diseases from a multitude of coughing travelers, said Andrew Pavia, a University of Utah infectious disease specialist in Salt Lake City.
``It will be extremely difficult to identify travelers with a specific respiratory infection of concern -- such as SARS, tuberculosis, or avian influenza -- against the wide backdrop of other respiratory infections with overlapping symptoms,'' said Pavia, who didn't contribute to the study, in an editorial in the same journal.
SARS spread from Hong Kong to Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, the U.S., and other countries mainly via infected airline passengers. Countries including China and Canada used a variety of screening methods to try to identify infected patients at their borders.
Pandemic Flu
Health officials are seeking ways to prevent other serious infections, such as an outbreak of pandemic flu, from entering countries via infected air passengers. Researchers have said that respiratory diseases may spread quickly on airlines, where passengers spend long hours in close proximity and breathe air that may carry germs on droplets or in aerosol form.
Studies suggest that diseases that cause coughing and sneezing may be very common in air travelers, making travelers with a specific illness difficult to pick out. As many as one in five travelers may develop a respiratory illness within a week of flying, Luna's team said in the study.
The wide variety of potential illnesses among travelers suggests that ``developing more efficient diagnostic assays is as essential as developing drugs themselves,'' the study authors concluded. ``Today, diagnostic technology is far from attaining this aim.''
The study and editorial will appear in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net .
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aMd5cXJZxU1w
By John Lauerman
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Screening sick airplane passengers to find those infected with flu is unlikely to stop the spread of a pandemic virus, researchers said after studying flight passengers during the SARS epidemic.
Patients with symptoms that suggested they had the SARS virus turned out to have a wide variety of infections, said researchers led by Luciano Kleber de Souza Luna of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Less than half of 155 patients studied were carrying identifiable germs, the researchers said.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, a viral lung disease, spread from China around the globe in 2003, infecting about 8,000 people and killing 774 of them. One of the lessons of the effort to control the disease is the difficulty of picking out patients with specific lung diseases from a multitude of coughing travelers, said Andrew Pavia, a University of Utah infectious disease specialist in Salt Lake City.
``It will be extremely difficult to identify travelers with a specific respiratory infection of concern -- such as SARS, tuberculosis, or avian influenza -- against the wide backdrop of other respiratory infections with overlapping symptoms,'' said Pavia, who didn't contribute to the study, in an editorial in the same journal.
SARS spread from Hong Kong to Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, the U.S., and other countries mainly via infected airline passengers. Countries including China and Canada used a variety of screening methods to try to identify infected patients at their borders.
Pandemic Flu
Health officials are seeking ways to prevent other serious infections, such as an outbreak of pandemic flu, from entering countries via infected air passengers. Researchers have said that respiratory diseases may spread quickly on airlines, where passengers spend long hours in close proximity and breathe air that may carry germs on droplets or in aerosol form.
Studies suggest that diseases that cause coughing and sneezing may be very common in air travelers, making travelers with a specific illness difficult to pick out. As many as one in five travelers may develop a respiratory illness within a week of flying, Luna's team said in the study.
The wide variety of potential illnesses among travelers suggests that ``developing more efficient diagnostic assays is as essential as developing drugs themselves,'' the study authors concluded. ``Today, diagnostic technology is far from attaining this aim.''
The study and editorial will appear in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net .