Airplanes are a germaphobe’s worst nightmare come true, particularly trans-continental flight. Add stories like these and it makes you want to never set foot in an airplane ever again.
A Nepali woman who was on a flight from New Delhi to Chicago and then onto San Francisco was diagnosed with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, prompting fears she might have infected fellow passengers. [link]
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.
CDC has launched a massive 17-state search for passengers who may have come in contact with this lady.
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.
Here’s the catch in reactions like the above one to a singular case of tuberculosis. 1 in 3 humans worldwide has come in contact with some form of tuberculosis.
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.
So is the US is overreacting for something that is so widespread and prevalent that efforts and money might be better spent developing medication to fight the disease? Or does the old adage of “Prevention is better than cure” still hold?
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