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Measles infected passenger puts five airports on alert
Health officials have issued a warning to passengers and airport workers at five cities after a 27 year old woman flew from London to New Mexico infected with measles.She had not been immunized for the disease and arrived in Albuquerque quite ill.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with the airlines to notify all passengers who were seated in her vicinity on the plane, but there are plenty of other opportunities to catch what she was traveling with.
Anyone that was within five rows of the woman is at risk of catching measles. Most people are immunized for measles at an early age, but those who did not receive the shot are now especially at risk, including babies and pregnant women.
The routes the infected passenger flew on are:
February 20 - London - Washington Dulles
February 22 - Baltimore - Denver
February 22 - Denver - Albuquerque
The CDC recommends that if you were on any of these flights you contact your family doctor. Symptoms include a runny nose, small red spots all over the body and a fever. If left untreated, the disease could lead to ear infections, pneumonia or even death.
Filed under: Europe, North America, Airlines, Airports, Travel Health
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chas Feb 27th 2011 5:05PM
The whole security thing at the airports is too over the top.
lucy Feb 27th 2011 5:24PM
Big woop. I already had the measles when I was a kid. They are making way too big a deal of it.
Kim Feb 27th 2011 5:43PM
obviously you are not a pregnant woman or a baby or small child. Measles in this day and age, especially those who have not have the Measle vaccine, cn be vry crtical in some cases.
Tom Feb 27th 2011 7:23PM
To Lucy: It sounds like you still are a kid, at least in common sense and maturity.
Measles can kill babies.
Once it is contracted, the vaccination will not work.
The biggest concern for pregnant women is that, if they are exposed to the disease, they may miscarry or have a baby that is terribly deformed.
Try using your computer for something other than tweeting and look it up.
If you encounter pictures of the deformed babies, you may grow up a bit and not be so glib and childish.
Julie Feb 27th 2011 6:19PM
I laugh at the fact that we were denied boarding from AA three yrs ago because my daughter vomited( she was 2yrs old) in her stroller at the gate. And this person was allowed on no questions asked??? Yeah this makes no sense to me!
Larry Feb 27th 2011 7:52PM
I consider it criminally irresponsible for a 27-year-old woman to knowingly expose hundreds of people to this disease.
She should be arrested, charged with reckless endangerment, and have to reimburse all persons involved for their medical expenses.
If the people had health insurance coverage, she needs to repay the insurance companies.
I do, however, find it odd that two or three airports/airlines allowed her to to pass through and get on another plane.
If she displayed symptoms in London, she should have been grounded there.
From a previous article I read, it sounds like she was obviously sick in Baltimore and should have never been allowed to board the plane to Denver.
And...., what about all of the people she exposed in airports, taxis, trains, etc.?
Even in China, with the SARS outbreak several years ago, they checked prospective passengers with thermal scanners and barred anyone with a fever from boarding a plane.
g Feb 27th 2011 8:34PM
Unbelievable! What other crap is the media going to drum up to disrupt air travel! Go get a real job! The person who traveled with whatever should pay for any illnesses she caused! This is so much B.S. that I have had enough of the media that I may never read another newspaper or watch anymore TV news!
Lucy Feb 27th 2011 9:24PM
You are confusing Rubella (German measles) with Rubeola (measles). German measles does cause birth defects if a pregnant woman contracts the disease. The outbreak spoken of in the news was Rubeola and except for similar symptoms, has little in common with Rubella. I was speaking of regular measles which are relatively benign for most folks. When I was young, if a child got measles, every mom for miles around would bring their child around to catch it so they would be immune for the rest of their lives. With any virus that causes inflammation, there are risks but with Rubeola the odds of having the complications that are sometimes associated with this virus are long indeed. one tenth of one percent may have these more serious complications. I know all about the pictures of deformed babies. That is what happens with Rubella. Rubeola is far more dangerous in adolescents and adults. This is the reason we sought to contract it as children. much better than using a vaccine loaded with mercury and contaminants, I think. Get your facts straight before criticizing.
FRED Feb 27th 2011 10:09PM
ONCE AGAIN - PROBLEMS - PROBLEMS - PROBLEMS - HOW COME NO ONE STATES THE AIRLINE????? HOW MANY AIRLINES FLY IN THE U.S., IF THERE IS A PROBLEM - STATE THE AIRLINE SHE FLEW ON, OR DO THE AIRLINE CONTROL IF THEIR NAME IS MENTIONED OR NOT??? IT WOULD RELIEVE A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO FLEW DURING THAT PERIOD. WHY HID THE NAME OF THE AIRLINE????
Samantha Feb 28th 2011 3:35PM
Lucy, as a nurse practitioner I advise you to do a bit of reading before you give opinions online. Stop with the hyperbole as well. Vaccines are not "loaded' with mercury contaminents. Each time you write you express your lack of knowledge. Open a book, go tothe library or do a bit of research on the computer in a reputable site authored by health care professionals, please. The woman who was ill should have been vaccinated as a child. She can cause untold harm because of her demonstrated lack of concern for everyone else. Adults react much differently than children to "childhood diseases". So this IS, as you so elegantly put it, a "big whoop". John Donne, the poet, wrote long ago that "No man is an island". No woman, either! If you're ill stay away from the general public, and especially stay off planes which are notorious for poor air circulation and harboring viruses and bacterias.
Terry Feb 27th 2011 11:38PM
You're all a bit uptight! Anyone born in the USA since the 1960's, who went to public schools here, either has been vaccinated or had the measles! The woman from London shouldn't have been allowed to board if she was obviously sick. But in all honesty, today the airlines are really lax about this kind of thing and wrongly so... It is important for everyone to get their vaccinations period, then you don't have to worry about situations like this. Stop worrying about mercury in vaccinations. People really have to look at risk vs benefit. The minute risk of vaccinations (the media has really blown things out of proportion) is far outweighed by the benefit of being vaccinated. So every "chill out"!
tfarnon Feb 28th 2011 1:32AM
Chances are, this woman, while "severely ill" by the time she reached Alberquerque, was still in the prodrome stage. That means her symptoms would have been indistinguishable from the common cold. If she wasn't hacking and sneezing, and "only" had a raging fever, muscle aches and fatigue, she could have quite easily not been noticed by airport security or flight personnel. Since the woman is probably not in health care, she's not exactly likely to know that these were the symptoms of something serious like measles or influenza. Even if she'd been a physician or a nurse, if she wasn't cheerfully obsessed by infectious diseases like I am (I'm not a doctor or nurse, but I am in health care), she wouldn't be likely to associate her symptoms with something as serious as measles.
I know. I spent many long flights as a child slumped in my seat because I'd caught influenza or just a bad cold that hadn't hit my nose and throat yet. And before you get all wound up and get on me for knowingly infecting people, I was 8 to 10 years old, and knew that if I told my mother, she would only yell at me about how I was just trying to "ruin" this trip (even if it was a flight we had to take because we were moving to another continent). I was not in a position to declare that I was infectious and needed to be isolated at home or in a hospital bed, even if I'd understood the danger of spreading infectious diseases.
There was a time when most children in the United States were vaccinated adequately against measles (the MMR vaccine), but we can all thank Jennie McCarthy and a now thoroughly discredited study for causing a significant number of parents to avoid having their children vaccinated. That's also why more children are now coming down with (and even dying from) whooping cough. The fear of vaccines (or mercury, depending on how specific you want to get) causing autism (they don't) has dropped vaccination rates significantly. It's stupid, but there you have it.
Many people don't remember the "good old days", when you didn't dare go to the public pool or swimming hole in summer because you might catch polio. They don't remember seeing photographs (or the real thing) of patients laying in iron lungs in hospital wards. They don't remember children dying, or recovering blinded or deaf from measles. Measles CAN be a very big deal. It's one of the diseases that helped to decimate previously unexposed Native American populations (as well as smallpox). If there's a vaccine for it, there is a greater risk of disability or death from the disease than the vaccine. It's that simple.