Fliers sought after tuberculosis scare
12/31/07 - 07:20 AM

Health officials continued their 17-state search Sunday for
passengers who may have been infected with a rare, potentially deadly
form of tuberculosis by a woman on an American Airlines flight from
New Delhi to Chicago.

The 30-year-old woman, a native of Nepal who now lives in Sunnyvale,
Calif., had been diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in India, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says. She was a
passenger on Flight 293 from India to Chicago and flew on to San
Francisco on Dec. 13.

About a week later, she checked in to the emergency room at Stanford
University Hospital. "She was quite sick," says Martin Cetron,
director of global migration and quarantine for the CDC. "She was at
the extreme end of the severity of the disease."

Today, says Gary Migdol, a hospital spokesman, "she is stable and
doing well."

She was seated in row 35; 44 people sat close enough for possible
exposure. From Chicago, they traveled to California, Colorado,
Florida, Georgia, elsewhere in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan,
Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee,
Texas, Vermont and Virginia.

The CDC recommends that they all undergo testing, with follow-up in
eight to 10 weeks. The CDC is concerned because the woman was
feverish and had other symptoms on the plane. The risk is believed to
be small, but the deadly TB bacillus can float on air for hours and
presents a greater threat in the confines of an airline cabin. All
passengers considered at possible risk will be contacted.

Cetron says that between June 2006 and June 2007, CDC officials have
been involved in about 100 similar investigations, "and the numbers
are increasing." Odds are, he says, that won't change: A third of the
world's 6.6 billion people are infected with TB, and more than 1
million international travelers arrive here each day.

"The probability that someone with TB is traveling unbeknownst to
anyone is still quite high," he says. "We can only prevent this if we
have a system of recognizing these cases that goes way back to the
patient and their provider."

The World Health Organization in July set guidelines for keeping
people with TB off planes. Many nations have laws of their own, but
they're porous and difficult to enforce.

In this case, Cetron says, Stanford doctors reacted quickly when they
learned the woman had been on an international flight, allowing
officials to contact American Airlines "before their records were
purged."

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