Can you catch Ebola on a Flight?
The Ebola outbreak is stoking fears of a deadly virus spreading across the world through air travel. We talked to experts to discover the risks of catching the disease mid-flight.
Are plane cabins hotbeds of disease? Frequent flyers are often on guard against sneezing or coughing co-passengers, in fear of catching what they have. And the possibility that much more serious epidemics or pandemics could spread by air travel has been a worry for years, whether it is avian flu, Sars or tuberculosis.
Now we are in the middle of one of the deadliest outbreaks of Ebola virus ever: the outbreak started in Guinea last March and soon reached Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Concern in the West has heightened after it emerged that a man had flown on internal flights while carrying the virus, with fears growing that air travel could quickly carry the terrifying disease around the world. British Prime Minister David Cameron described Ebola as a “serious threat”.
The risks of catching an infection from an ill passenger are not as high as you would think, says Christine Pearson, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. “It’s not any more dangerous than any place where you are in touch with lots of people – like a shopping mall food court for example.
A spokesperson for the World Health Organization, Gregory Härtl, says its official stance currently is that a global epidemic is a “small risk”, although it is currently working with the International Air Transport Association to review their recommendations. Currently, it does not recommend screening passengers at airports – since the thermal scanners used to detect a fever are unlikely to find people incubating the first stages of the disease – and there are no recommended travel restrictions.
However; the situation is evolving fast and the recommendations may change in the coming days. At the moment, no one can yet predict whether other air travellers have been infected with the disease, but the hope is that heightened vigilance will help to minimise any potential risk. However, even if it is successfully contained and the outbreak peters out, Ebola shows, yet again, the fact that no disaster or epidemic is too distant in the highly-connected modern world.
- TM Sruthi