Airport Ebola Screens Hampered by Dormant Virus, Tylenol
By Mark Drajem and Alan Levin
Bloomberg.com
Oct 8, 2014
There’s no foolproof way to screen airline passengers for a disease like Ebola that lies dormant and undetectable for days.
While enhanced screening announced yesterday for New York’s John F. Kennedy and four other U.S. airports will help stem the disease’s spread, it’s an imperfect defense against a complex public health emergency, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University in Washington.
The reliability of screening arriving passengers rests largely on travelers being honest about whether they have come in contact with others infected with Ebola. And tricks such as taking Tylenol before landing to help ensure they can pass a fever test when going through Customs have been used by passengers before, such as during the 2003 SARS virus outbreak.
“If the goal is 100 percent effectiveness in terms of keeping Ebola patients out of the country, this won’t work,” Anish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said in an interview. The increased screening “is a step in the right direction but it’s hardly foolproof.”
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