Health Officials Say Planes are Vehciles for Spread of Disease

-- SARS on an airplane. Mumps on an airplane. And now a rare and dangerous form of tuberculosis on at least two airplanes.

Commercial air travel's potential for spreading infection continues to cause major concern among public health officials, as Tuesday's news of a jet-setting man with a rare and deadly form of TB demonstrates.

"We always think of planes as a vehicle for spreading disease," said Dr. Doug Hardy, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

In the latest incident, reported by health officials on Tuesday, a Georgia man with extensively drug-resistant TB ignored doctors' advice and took two trans-Atlantic flights before going voluntarily to a New York hospital, leading to the first U.S. government-ordered isolation since 1963.

The man, whom officials did not identify, is at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital in respiratory isolation. He was taken there after spending three days in a hospital in New York. He will be transferred to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver in the next few days.

He was not considered highly contagious, and there are no confirmed reports that the illness spread to other passengers.

But his case illustrates ongoing concerns about the public health perils of plane travel, as well as the continuing problem of Typhoid Mary-like individuals who can almost be counted on to do the wrong thing.

The man decided to proceed with a long-planned wedding trip despite being advised not to fly.

"There's always going to be situations where there is a lack of understanding and appreciation of responsibility to the community in a situation like this," said Dr. John Ho, an infectious diseases specialist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The incident also points out weaknesses in the system: The man was able to re-enter the United States, even though he said he had been warned by federal officials that his passport was being flagged and he was being placed on a no-fly list.

CDC officials said they contacted the Department of Homeland Security to put the man on a no-fly list, but it doesn't appear he was added by the time he flew from Prague to Montreal and drove across the border from Canada.

A Transportation Security Administration spokesman could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Challenges in coordinating with airlines and in communicating with the media also have emerged, said Glen Nowak, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This clearly is going to have some relevance to our pandemic influenza preparedness," Nowak said.

There have been several prominent disease-on-a-plane incidents in recent years.

Perhaps best known is severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which erupted in Asia in 2003. Over three months, CDC workers delayed on the tarmac 12,000 airplanes carrying 3 million passengers arriving from SARS-affected countries, isolating people with SARS symptoms.

Last year, CDC officials worked with airlines and state health departments to track two infected airline passengers who may have helped spread a mumps epidemic throughout the Midwest.

And in March, a flight from Hong Kong was held at Newark Liberty International Airport for two hours because some on board reported feeling ill from a flu-like illness. They were released when it became clear they had seasonal flu, and not an avian variety.

Medical experts say TB is significantly less contagious than flu, SARS and other maladies that have led to airport alerts
source:www.myfoxcolorado.com