Flu? What flu? Commercial Passenger Airline Traffic as a Disease Vector.

Why is no one's talking about it? Fearless Leader wants to dump posse comitatus at the first sign of sniffles? How about a serious moratorium on Passenger air travel? Did you know mosquitos fly United....? Think about that.

It seems to me the real threat of one of the super bugs getting around is airline travel. How necessary is it for us to be able to have lunch in New York, then arrive, just in time for lunch, in L.A.?

"Increased affordability and availability of air travel and mobility of people, make airborne, food-borne, vector-borne infectious diseases more common and more easily transmitted and is an important public health issue.

Health officials have had to re-examine the potential of these agents because of increased fears of bio terrorism which could be spread by air travel. The SARS outbreak of 2002 showed how air travel can have an important role in the rapid spread of newly emerging infections and could potentially even start pandemics.

In addition to flight crew, public health officials and health care professionals have an important role in the management of infectious diseases transmitted on airlines and should be familiar with guidelines provided by local and international authorities"

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=8352

freaked me out.

He hasn't been able to declare a lockdown on the country this far, so now he's gonna start stacking the deck with a bunch of what ifs. Like what if people start getting sick.

Since thousands won't have access to medical care, better keep their asses quarantined and locked up so they don't spread it to the sons and daughters of CEOs and politicians, ain't that right?

i traveled at the time of SARS & must say i was v. impressed, this disease, which was touted to hi heaven as the next disaster, ended up being contained in a surprisingly small amt of time

& yes we were still able to travel by air

even to canada, imagine that!

I worked with sales and support folk for a long time - real "road warriors." They never took a day off, even if they were down to no legs and one arm and spurting from all wounds (think Holy Grail). Most deadly illnesses start with cold and flu like symptoms. The serious road warriors would dose up with Dayquil in the morning, again at noon, take their nyquil with a couple of shots of JD, and do it all over the next day. Our office was a plague ward thanks to these disease vectors.

With all of the recirculation on planes these days, it's likely that one of these plague monkeys could infect a third of the 300 people on a plane, and however many they came into contact with in the client offices and the airports. A lot of the sales and support personnel at one of my former companies would be on the road Tuesday though Friday, in a different city every night and on at least one, if not two, planes a day.

Imagine one of them getting something serious. (Smallpox has always been my big fear, but a dose of plague or a new flu mutation are scary, too.) Multiply the 70 or so we had at M***Corp by all of the corporations and businesses that do that kind of thing, and watch the vectors become uncontrollable. There's no way to contain a disease when the people spreading it are oblivious to the fact that they are contagious.

It is just too quick in a world with SARS, Yersina Pestis, Ebola, and other virulent agents.

It is only a matter of time before it really bites us hard.