# 4230
Six weeks before last Spring’s outbreak of novel H1N1 in Mexico and California, I wrote a blog entitled:
Sunday, March 08, 2009
How The Next Pandemic Will Arrive
# 2876
There is a lot we don't currently know about the next pandemic. We don't know when it will arrive. We don't know what virus will cause it. And we don't know how bad it will be.
But there is one thing almost certain.
It will arrive in most countries by airplane.
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.
Granted, this essay was mostly inspired by finding the youtube video above . . . But timing is everything . . .
And as it turned out, college students returning from Spring Break in Mexico were credited – in large part - for the rapid world-wide spread of the H1N1 virus last spring.
This is the price we pay for global commerce and travel. A greater vulnerability to rapidly spreading pathogens.
What has been less clear is how much transmission of an influenza virus takes place during an airline flight.
We’ve heard airline reassurances about HEPA filtering, and the number of air exchanges per hour in the passenger cabin, but instinctively most of us suspect that jamming a couple of hundred people into a plane like sardines must entail some infection risks.
Today, researchers at UCLA have quantified that risk. And as one might expect, the denser the seating arrangement (economy class), the better chance of viral transmission.
This from the UCLA Newsroom.
Study finds H1N1 virus spreads easily by plane
Your best bet? Avoid economy and fly first class, UCLA researchers say
By Mark Wheeler January 06, 2010 Category: Health Sciences, Research
Viruses love plane travel. They get to fly around the world inside a closed container while their infected carrier breathes and coughs, spreading pathogens to other passengers, either by direct contact or through the air. And once people deplane, the virus can spread to other geographical areas.
Scientists already know that smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, seasonal influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) can be transmitted during commercial flights. Now, in the first study to predict the number of H1N1 flu infections that could occur during a flight, UCLA researchers found that transmission during transatlantic travel could be fairly high.
Reporting in the current online edition of the journal BMC Medicine, Sally Blower, director of the Center for Biomedical Modeling at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, along with Bradley Wagner and Brian Coburn, postdoctoral fellows in Blower's research group, used novel mathematical modeling techniques to predict in-flight transmission of the H1N1 virus.
They found that transmission could be rather significant, particularly during long flights, if the infected individual travels in economy class. Specifically, two to five infections could occur during a five-hour flight, five to 10 during an 11-hour flight, and seven to 17 during a 17-hour flight.
"Clearly, it was air travel, by transporting infectious individuals from the epicenter in Mexico to other geographic locations, that significantly affected the spread of H1N1 during the outbreak last spring," Coburn said. "However, until our study, it hadn't been determined how important in-flight transmission could be. Therefore, we decided to make a mathematical model and predict what could be expected to occur during a flight."
There is obviously very little you can do to protect yourself from influenza during a prolonged flight if the person seated next to you is infected with the virus.
Very little, except of course, getting the flu vaccine every year.
There’s always that.
