Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As governments around the world consider ways to ensure that their countries don't succumb to an outbreak of the Ebola virus, some have introduced mandatory airport screenings for passengers arriving on flights from those West African countries that have been affected.
Airports in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France and the Czech Republic are taking temperatures and giving health questionnaires to people arriving from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
But how effective is this type of screening, and will it make the public safer?
We've been speaking to Dr Cameron Kahn, an infectious disease physician at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada.
He's also one of the authors of a paper that examined the potential of the Ebola virus to spread across international borders via commercial air travel.
In the first part of his study, he wanted to know how efficient screening of travellers is.
And as Dr Khan explained, people leaving those countries are being screened at point of departure.
Assuming that those passengers who do show symptoms prior to boarding are refused permission to fly, the entry-level screening can only identify those people who develop symptoms while flying.
What are the chances of that happening?
Ben Carter's been looking at this.
And there was another question that Dr Khan and his team wanted to find an answer to.
How many of those infected with Ebola in those three countries were likely to fly?
Governments have known for quite some time that identifying passengers carrying infectious diseases is a difficult task because they've tried it before.
In 2003, an outbreak of SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, began in the Guangdong province in China.
In the following months, cases were reported in Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam.
The World Health Organization issued a global health alert for SARS as it became clear that the disease was being spread by global air travel.
We've been talking to David Mabee, Professor of Communicable Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and co-author of a British medical journal paper, Airport Screening for Ebola.
Professor Mabee looked at data from Canada which introduced airport screening during the SARS epidemic.
David Mabey.
The dangers of not doing any screening at all at airports, though, can be highlighted by a story from Nigeria.
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