US airline fails to alert IGI staff on swine flu

New Delhi: A vital omission by American Airlines in relation to passengers on its Chicago-Delhi direct flight on Friday night could have cost India dear.
The staff of flight AA 292, which arrived in Delhi at 8.30 pm on Friday, did not inform the Union health ministry's airport health officer about two passengers on board who had flu-like symptoms before the plane landed at Indira Gandhi international airport.
According to doctors at IGI airport, it was evident just by looking at 45-year-old Paramjit Kaur and 51-year-old Jagjivan Singh that they were suffering from fever, cough and cold and upper respiratory diseases. On further scrutiny, it was found that Paramjit (in a wheel chair) and Jagjivan, both of whom originally hailed from Fatehabad Sahib in Punjab, had visited the affected the American states of Texas and Chicago.
The two were immediately whisked away to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital's isolation ward where their samples were taken for testing and sent to the National Institute of Communicable Diseases. Providentially, both have tested negative.
What's worse is that Paramjit and Jagjivan, who were sitting in the last row of the aircraft, were the last to disembark. This meant that if both had been infected, the virus could have easily spread to the passengers who had sat near them. Had the airline informed the health staff at IGI about them, Paramjit and Jagjivan could have been isolated immediately after the flight landed and the passengers sitting around them could have been tested as well.
In reality, because the two passengers were the last to get off the flight, health officials had no clue about their condition and had, therefore, allowed all the other passengers to leave the airport. ``We will now have to trace the passengers who sat in the three rows in front of Paramjit and Jagjivan, visit them individually and look for symptoms,'' a ministry source said.
The civil aviation ministry has already asked the DGCA to train airline staff to be vigilant about passengers with flu-like symptoms coming from infected countries.
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03/05/09 Kounteya Sinha/Times of India

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Categories: Airports May 2009, Safety May 2009