Sunnyvale woman with TB may have infected airplane passenger

The Sunnyvale woman who flew to the United States in December after contracting a dangerous case of drug-resistant tuberculosis may have infected another passenger on the flight from India, federal officials said Wednesday, underscoring the slim but real threat of contracting the potentially deadly disease on an airplane.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the information after an aggressive effort to contact and test 44 passengers from 16 states who sat near the woman on the flight. Although she had been diagnosed in India, she did not disclose that she had the disease until she went to the emergency room at Stanford Hospital upon her return to the Bay Area.

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In the News: The flight of the Sunnyvale woman
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"It's impossible to definitively link the positive test to the airline exposure at this point," said Shelly Diaz, a CDC spokeswoman, noting that the other passenger could have contracted the disease in India as the Sunnyvale woman did. But "it is a possibility" the disease was spread on American Airlines Flight 293 on Dec. 13, a 16-hour Boeing 777 trip from New Delhi to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
The threat of TB transmission on a commercial flight became a high-profile public issue last year, when Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer, flew to Paris with drug-resistant TB, potentially infecting others on two trans-Atlantic flights. CDC's follow-up investigation has found that Speaker infected no one else in his travels.
Like Speaker, the 30-year-old
Sunnyvale woman suffers from a strain of disease that is resistant to both primary TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampin, making her case much more medically serious and expensive to treat. But the Sunnyvale woman may have been even more contagious during her flight than Speaker was, said the local public health officer in charge of investigating her case.
16/04/08 Mike Swift/San Jose Mercury News, USA

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2008