Stepped up efforts by the US to halt the spread of the Ebola virus started at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport yesterday, where teams armed with thermal guns and questionnaires will screen travellers from West African countries hit hardest by the outbreak.
JFK Airport is the first of five US airports to start enhanced screening of US-bound travellers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where most of the outbreak’s more than 4,000 deaths have occurred.
Airport screening is just one aspect of an overall strategy to fight the spread of Ebola
Nearly all of those travelling to the US from those countries arrive at JFK, Newark Liberty, Washington Dulles, Chicago O’Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta. The new procedures will begin at the other four airports this week.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the airport screening is just one aspect of an overall strategy to fight the spread of Ebola.
“Because we want to protect the American public, we are taking a tiered approach,” said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald.
But even before authorities start checking passengers for fevers, critics questioned whether the screenings would prove effective at stopping travellers infected with the often fatal Ebola virus from entering the country.
JFK is the US entry point for nearly half of the roughly 150 travellers who arrive daily from the three West African countries, and those flights amount to about one-tenth of one per cent of all international daily arrivals to the airport, McDonald said.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will conduct the screenings under CDC direction, McDonald said. Using FDA-approved infrared temperature guns, the CBP staffers will check for elevated temperatures among passengers whose journeys began or included a stop in one of the three West African countries.
Screeners will also assess passengers for signs of potential illness and ask them to answer questions about their health and whether they may have come into contact with an Ebola patient.
Those with a fever or other symptoms or possible exposure to Ebola will be referred to the CDC, which will determine next steps. Health authorities may decide to take a person to hospital for evaluation, testing and treatment or to quarantine or isolate the patient under federal law.
“Breaking a federal quarantine order is punishable by fines and imprisonment,” according to the CDC’s website.
But US health authorities have never before used fever monitoring to screen travellers, said Lawrence Gostin, who teaches global health law at Georgetown Law School, and that monitoring didn’t work well when used in Canada and Asia during the SARS outbreak in 2002.
Fever-monitoring “had virtually no effectiveness,” he said. “It is unlikely to keep us safe.”
Taking over-the-counter medication during the flight can easily help travellers bring down a fever to evade detection, Gostin said. Passengers also could lie on questionnaires aimed at determining whether the traveller has been exposed to the deadly virus, said Dr David Mabey, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“People may not fill them in very truthfully. They don’t want to be delayed for hours,” Mabey said.
Passengers are already screened when they depart from the three West African countries. In the two months since those screenings began, only 77 of the 36,000 screened travellers were denied boarding, the CDC said. Many of them were diagnosed later with malaria, and none with Ebola.