A pox on the passengers

Does flying make you sick? Not the cargo-class seats or the C-ration meals, but the recycled, bone-dry cabin air. Does it make you ill-literally?

Airlines are worried that it might. The Air Transport Association is developing new guidelines to deal with in-flight infectious diseases and carriers are clamping down on sick people who try to travel.

While there are no formal studies on the dangers of cabin air, medical experts say the odds of catching an airborne virus on a flight are significantly higher than they would be elsewhere.

“There’s an increased risk of infection in an aircraft cabin, because the air is in a confined location,” says Dr. Peter J. Lambrou, who is the director of the institute of aviation medicine and safety at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

To get a sense of how concerned airlines are these days, check out Joanne Morehouse’s story. She was flying home from Washington’s National Airport to Rochester, N.Y., on US Airways with her husband, two children and nephew after a two-week visit to Florida in April. Her nephew had come down with chicken pox in the Sunshine State but, she claims, was no longer contagious.

US Airways gate agents in Washington weren’t so sure about her nephew’s health. After initially letting the family board the Rochester flight, Morehouse says the pilot claimed there was a “medical emergency” and then unceremoniously asked the five passengers to gather their belongings and exit.

An agent refunded the family’s tickets and told them they had to find another way home. The Moorehouses caught a train back to Rochester.

“I have never been more outraged or humiliated in my entire life,” Moorehouse fumed. Like other carriers, US Airways has a policy of refusing to transport “any passenger who is known to have a contagious disease which has been determined by the U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control or other federal public health authority to be transmissible to other persons in the normal course of a flight.”

Needless to say, a chicken-pox carrier is extremely dangerous to young children or pregnant women. Maybe the US Airways gate agents over reacted to the pock-riddled boy, but if they did, they erred on the right side.

“These are extremely difficult circumstances to deal with,” adds US Airways spokesman David Castelveter. “We tried to do our very best. Possibly, there are some things we could have done better.”

One of the ATA’s goals is to do just that: to make the process of identifying, handling and notifying passengers who may have been exposed to a contagious disease a little better. After a passenger infected four others with tuberculosis in 1995, the ATA collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control on ways to deal with future TB cases.

“This is a very delicate issue with the carriers,” says Ron Welding, director of operations standards at the Air Transport Association. “People will fly even if they’re infected. And you can’t just stop someone at the gate and say, ‘You’re not looking so good, maybe you should go home and get some rest’.”

Now, airlines want to codify how to handle measles and rubella. If adopted, the recommendations would standardize how an airline alerts a crew and passengers when there’s a risk of infection. Welding cautions that these guidelines, when finished, may be implemented months from now-or never.

“It’s up to the management of the airlines to do what they think is necessary,” he says.

Airlines might want to consider going further. Think about how many times you’ve gotten sick after a flight, even though no one was sneezing and wheezing around you.

In fact, “some people get on the plane and they don’t exhibit any symptoms at all,” notes Phillip R. Morris, executive vice president for Medjet Assistance, LLC, a Birmingham, Ala., medical transportation company. A cough into an air duct is all it takes to contaminate a lot of passengers.

How can airlines stop that from happening? It won’t be easy. And it will certainly take more than adopting a few guidelines. Passengers need to know that the aircraft cabin is a pressure-cooker for infectious diseases that flying while sick puts everyone around them at risk. Now would be a good time to start telling their customers.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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