Dozens of passengers on three recent international flights to the U.S. arrived with flu-like symptoms in New York and Philadelphia. Public health experts say it’s a lucky break that the incidents didn’t lead to an outbreak of a highly contagious and deadly infection such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
In a September 8, 2018 Business Insider article, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said that the spate of sick passengers arriving in a short period of time “is kind of a warning shot….Imagine that it was MERS, and it arrived in an airport where nobody recognized it, and then those people all went, scattered.”
The sick passengers, who arrived on September 5 and 6, were believed to have started their travels in Saudi Arabia, where they may have been participating in the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage that draws several million people each year to Mecca and where viruses may circulate. Passengers in both New York and Philadelphia were kept isolated until they were checked by medical professionals.
Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology, said that having more health professionals around the world trained to identify and report illnesses would be one of the best ways to prepare for future outbreaks.
Read the Business Insider article: A Harvard professor says the dozens of passengers sickened on international flights are a clear ‘warning shot’ of a worst-case scenario
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Preparing in ‘peacetime’ for the next infectious disease outbreak (Harvard Chan School feature)