# 3055
Seven weeks ago I posted a fascinating video simulation showing International Airline flights over a 24-hour day.
The name of the blog was How The Next Pandemic Will Arrive.
Epidemiologists have long figured that commercial airliners would prove efficient at dispersing a new pathogen globally.
Watch the video, and you can readily see why.
The video above, which as been making the rounds for several months, was made by ZHAW (Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften) or The Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
Every year there are more than 17,000,000 commercial airline flights (data from year 2000 - it's probably higher now) that carry hundreds of millions of passengers each year.
Here are the top 10 ten airports in the world listed by International Travelers. London's Heathrow handles 60 million International passengers a year.
That's about 165,000 International passengers a day.
From the Wikipedia - Click to Enlarge
All of this poses a real challenge to airports, air carriers, and public health officials as they try to figure out ways to intercept, and delay, diseases as they wing their way around the world.
During the last great pandemic, in 1918, the fastest mode of transcontinental travel was by steam ship, and relatively few made journeys of that sort back then.
The Spanish Flu still managed to spread around the globe in a matter of weeks.
Today, an airline passenger can make it to just about anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours.
Some airports will attempt to intercept passengers using Thermal Scanners - and that may reduce the number of infected people from entering a country – but it is unlikely to keep a pandemic out.
Singapore’s Changi airport has announced their plan to try to screen incoming passengers using infra-red scanning technology.
April 27, 2009
Swine flu outbreak
Experts warn, however, that such measures are likely to fall short (see Study: U.S. Airport Entry Screening In Response To Pandemic Influenza).
Thermal imaging equipment is subject to both false negatives and false positives, and asymptomatic passengers can walk right past them without triggering an alert.
HEAT SEEKER (Time Magazine 2003)
Earlier this year a study by French researchers (see Study: Effectiveness Of Non-Contact Infrared Temperature Screening) appeared that indicated that the infrared temperature screening devices being deployed into airports were of limited value.
Helen Branswell, of the Canadian Press, wrote the following:
Studies show little merit in airport temperature screening for disease
Monday, 16 February 2009 - 11:58am.
By Helen Branswell
TORONTO — Using temperature scanners in airports to try to identify and block entry of sick travellers during a disease outbreak is unlikely to achieve the desired goal, a report by French public health officials suggests.
Their analysis, based on a review of studies on temperature screening efforts like those instituted during the 2003 SARS outbreak, says the programs may be of limited use in the early days of a flu pandemic, when governments might be tempted to order screening of incoming travellers to try to delay introduction of the illness within their borders.
While it may not be possible to prevent the entry of a new virus into our – or any – country, attempts will be made to try to delay the inevitable.
That, some officials hope, will buy time and allow for fewer starting foci of infection, slowing the progression and spread of the virus.
