Flying this week? Don't be surprised if you're handed a face mask or have a heat detecting gun fired at you as you step off the plane.
As the swine flu continues to spread around the world, airports are pulling out all the stops to keep the virus at bay, using everything from high-tech thermal imaging scanners to good old fashioned breathing masks and disinfectant. They're precautions that many airports and airlines had to learn on the fly during the rapid spread of the SARS and Foot and Mouth epidemics
"The safety and security of employees and passengers is our number-one priority –airlines have a long history of monitoring and preparing for communicable diseases like swine flu,” said ATA president and CEO James C. May in a statement. “Travelers should and airline employees are taking the situation seriously, but no one should panic."
The problem is, it's not clear that the steps being taken actually work.
Since the swine flu started spreading out of Mexico and around the world, governments have being trying – mostly unsuccessfully – to keep their populations infection free. Airports have become especially vigilant. In Prague, terminals are plastered with information boards and drop-in test centers hastily erected. In Moscow, suspect arriving flights are taxied to a special area and boarded by medics. Spain has stocked planes with face masks and rubber gloves. And in airports around the world – from Bangkok, Manila and Seoul to Sofia, Minneapolis and Punta Cana – scanners designed to identify and quarantine the feverish and flu-like are now in use.
The scanners, made by companies like Cantronic Systems, Flir, and QualSec, work by reading facial temperatures. Slate's William Saletan, citing a report from the Canadian government, writesthat the machines "determine the temperature of an object by measuring the amount of infared radiation emitted by that object; the higher the temperature, the more infrared radiation that is emitted." Those with elevated temperatures, which might indicate fever, can be easily identified and tagged for additional screening.
While the scanners might bring a sense of relief to a jittery traveling public, they're probably not all that helpful. Turns out that the flu is too smart for even the slickest thermal imaging gun. That's because once someone becomes infected, it can take a day or more before symptoms kick in. I might come down with the stealthy swine flu, infect all 110 of the people on my flight to Denver, and walk out of the airport before I'm even aware that I'm sick. Without a fever, the sensors aren't going to tell anyone anything. Which is why despite a massive mobilization at airports around the world, the swine flu keeps spreading.
"Border controls don't work. Screening doesn't work," Gregory Hartl of the WHO told Manila's ABS. "Fever monitoring doesn't work because you don't get the cases which are still in incubation."
But Slate's Saletan argues that though imperfect, scanners beat the alternative, which is manually screening passengers for disease. "Looking for symptoms? Asking people whether they are sick?" he writes. "At least a heat scanner measures something quantifiable and catches more than the eye can see."
It's not like this is the first time the travel industry has found itself in the contagion control business. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, which sickened almost 9,000 people and nearly wiped a handful of big Asian airlines off the map, airport officials handed out countless gloves and face masks, did visual inspections on tens and thousands of passengers, and disinfected surfaces like their lives depended on it (and in some cases, they're lives did depend on it).
And during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which forced the untimely slaughter of millions of lovable cows and pigs and made it tough to find a good burger in London, airlines got in the habit of spraying down the aisles of planes with Lysol and requiring passengers to walk across a bath mat soaked with disinfectant as they boarded and deplaned.
It is tough to measure what impact the thermal imaging devices are having in slowing the spread of the swine flu virus, but now that the WHO has raised its pandemic alert to level 5, it might not make a difference. Once it reaches the general population, it doesn't really matter what happens at the airport.
Photo: Flickr/laimagendelmundo
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