LAT: LAX Plans for Bird Flu Quarantines

[question everything]

LAX Plans for Bird Flu Quarantines

With the airport a major entry point from Asia, officials are considering how to sequester a jet's passengers to prevent the spread of disease.
By Jennifer Oldham
Times Staff Writer

October 18, 2005

Officials at Los Angeles International Airport are racing to devise plans to quarantine hundreds of passengers on the airfield for days to prevent the spread of bird flu.

Federal officials could order travelers on a flight confined, if they suspect that one of them is infected with the deadly disease.

(snip)

Twenty-six flights arrive at LAX each day from Asia — more than twice as many as at any other U.S. airport. Every day, up to 10,000 passengers disembark from those aircraft. Aviation officials worry that the bird flu could mimic severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which journeyed to five countries in 24 hours after emerging in rural China in spring 2003.

(snip)

Airport officials are preparing plans to quarantine up to 1,600 passengers in four locations. They are wrestling with how to shelter and feed them and with how many toilets are needed, as well as whether to use force to keep travelers from leaving. They also are studying who would pay for the costly operation.

(snip)

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-laxflu18oct18,1,3161852.story

[Athame]

1. My sister caught SARS on a flight from Hawaii

where she and 14 of her associates had gone for a sales meeting. Twelve of the 15 on that trip came down with acute respiratory illness within 48 hours of the flight home (Air China) but only she and one other were hospitalized with severe pneumonia. The flight came into San Francisco, but the others returned to the company base in Seattle. Only she stayed in California. The SARS diagnosis was made later. The trip occured in February at the beginning of the SARS crisis. But as far as she knows there was no investigation of the flight or others on it because she was the only one actually diagnosed.

If it had been influenza it would have been way too late. The passengers on the plane from Hawaii had come from all over. The plane itself had come from China, but the flight originated in Hawaii. I cannot figure out how they would prevent the same thing happening all over the place with the flu.

[progressivebydesign]

3. I hope your sister recovered okay. That's a scary story. n/t

[Athame]

5. Thanks, recovery took more than a year

and weakened her system. She has just recently been diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, but doctors don't know if there is any relation, it could be the other way around--that her immune system was compromised, having received radiation treatment for breast cancer a year before the SARS. She has been through the wringer, for sure.

The thing about the flu as I understand it (from reading John Barry's book, The Great Influenza), is that there may be no symptoms while someone is in a contagious stage. With SARS, eventually they were scanning people for fever before they boarded planes, but not until the epidemic was already moving. My point was that the measures for containment entirely missed the early spread and were more window dressing later. I do think that there were probably many more cases of SARS than were reported, just from my sister's experience and watching the CDC charts closely. It was not nearly as deadly as the flu has been so far. Only about 4% mortality of documented cases.

[progressivebydesign]

2. Fine with me. They do this with SARS as well, don' they?

There was a time when people had these quarantines and also required shots to travel from country to country. Seems reasonable if someone is at risk for spreading the disease. I think the time for screening should be BEFORE the person gets on a plane...

[question everything]

4. Except, vaccines for bird flu are about a year off (nt)