12/31/07

UNITED STATES:  Fliers Sought After Tuberculosis Scare

On Sunday, health officials continued to track down passengers who sat near a woman with drug-resistant tuberculosis on an American Airlines flight from New Delhi to Chicago.

The woman, a native of Nepal who now lives in Sunnyvale, California, was a passenger of Flight 293 from India to Chicago and flew on to San Francisco on Dec. 13. Around a week later, she was admitted to the emergency room at Stanford University Hospital. "She was quite sick," said Martin Cetron, CDC's director of global migration and quarantine. "She was at the extreme end of the severity of the disease." Hospital spokesperson Gary Migdol said she is now "stable and doing well."

Forty-four people sat close enough to the woman, who was seated in row 35, for possible exposure. From Chicago, they traveled to California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, other areas of Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia.

CDC recommends that all those potentially exposed undergo testing, with follow-up in eight to 10 weeks. All passengers considered potentially at risk will be contacted. The agency is concerned because the woman was feverish and had other symptoms on the plane. While the risk is considered low, TB bacteria can float on air for hours and present a greater threat in the confines of an airline cabin.

From June 2006 to June 2007, CDC has investigated around 100 similar incidents, "and the numbers are increasing," said Cetron. The odds are this is unlikely to change: a third of the world's 6.6 billion people carry the bacteria, and more than 1 million international passengers arrive in the United States each day.

In July, the World Health Organization set guidelines to keep people with TB off planes. However, these can be difficult to enforce. "We can only prevent this if we have a system of recognizing these cases that goes way back to the patient and their provider," said Cetron.

Source: USA Today:: Steve Sternberg; Courtesy of the CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention