Airport screening for Ebola at the point of disembarkation (or arrival) will be a logistical nightmare and much less effective than aggressive exit-screening in outbreak-affected countries, says a leading epidemiologist.
Screening of arriving passengers here at the disembarkation point is just a nightmare to do logistically, said Peter Katona, a Clinical Professor of Medicine in the division of infectious diseases at UCLAs Geffen School of Medicine. You can weed out arriving passengers at high risk based on where they have been and where they changed planes. But you have
Even so, on Wednesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that airline passengers who have arrived in the U.S. through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa would undergo enhanced screening for the deadly virus, notably being checked for fever using a non-contact thermometer.
JFK Airport, Immigration (Credit: Wikipedia)
The CDC reported that the screenings are due to take effect at New Yorks Kennedy airport on Saturday, with Washington-Dulles, Newark, Chicago-OHare and Atlanta International to follow next week. The CDC says that the new screenings will cover over 94 percent of travelers from affected countries.
The problem with a massive arrival screening process is those protocols tend to be fairly crude, says John Hansman, Director of MITs International Center of Air Transportation, noting the tendency is to over-screen and generate lots of false positives.
And, as Katona points out, in the affected regions points of embarkation, embarking passengers desperate to get out of a stricken area may be prone to lie about their contact history to do so.
In such regions, he suggests using an aggressive form of questioning that includes some sort of carrot and stick psychology; with the real promise of quality health-care as the carrot and prosecution and jail time as the stick. But with the lackluster international response to the crisis thus far, hes uncertain whether such an approach can work in West Africa.
Thus, with the potential for infected passengers to slip through such health dragnets, does flying anywhere in the commercial air transport system during such outbreaks present a significant risk?
Sitting next to someone isnt enough to transmit Ebola on an aircraft itself, says Katona. If theyre not vomiting or coughing on you then the risk is very small, he said.
More: