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Grounding planes won't stop swine flu from spreading | At a recent meeting
in Washington, a panel of experts from the government, academia and the airlines
industry, has determined that attempting to ground planes won't stop pandemics
like swine flu from spreading. One of the major conclusions from the two-day meeting
was that restricting air travel during a pandemic, such as the current swine flu
strain of influenza that is circulating globally, is not likely to have much of
an effect. This falls in line with recommendations that the World Health Organization
made earlier this year when it declared the new swine flu strain of influenza
- H1N1- to be a bona fide pandemic. The WHO advised in June that it was safe to
travel - including on airplanes. This advice followed weeks of diminished travel
to and from Mexico, where the new strain of H1N1 first emerged. During April,
some 2,000 flights a day to Mexico were cancelled - partly because certain countries
restricted travel and partly because so many people cancelled their travel plans.
Despite the lower-than-normal travel, pandemic influenza continued to spread around
the world, and that is not surprising to scientists like Ben Cooper of the Health
Protection Agency in the UK, one of several panelists at the Washington meeting
who said travel restrictions are not likely to work. "Even a little bit of air
travel goes a long way in spreading diseases like influenza," Cooper said. "So,
any achievable reductions in flying are not likely to make much of a difference,"
he added. At the symposium, organized by the National Research Council's Transportation
Research Board, Cooper showed data that modeled the effect of travel restrictions
on the spread of a pandemic. Even in the best-case scenario, in which major cities
managed to reduce air travel by 99.9 percent after the very first case emerged,
Cooper's models showed that a pandemic would merely be postponed by several weeks
- arriving later to those cities but establishing outbreaks eventually. "It delays
things a bit, but even such an extreme intervention is not effective," Cooper
said. In reality, there would likely be thousands of cases before any stringent
travel restrictions could be put in place, and under a more realistic scenario,
restricting travel makes very little difference at all. Part of the problem is
that when people are sick, they fly anyway, despite a consensus among the experts
on the panel that people with suspected cases of influenza should not fly. When
they do, they risk exposing other passengers - especially those people sitting
immediately next to them. |
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