chicka12

I looked to see if someone had already posted about this story yesterday, but couldn't find anything. Did anyone else hear about mumps possibly spreading to other mid western states after a carrier transfered it via flying?

CDC Eyes Air Travelers in Mumps Epidemic
Link

Martinis at 8

Yeah. I wish you sick people would stay off of my flights and quit spreading your nasty contagion

Schurr

Here's the CDC's report. The flights in question were NWA and AA and are listed in the notice.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwr...cid=mm5514a6_e




Exposure to Mumps During Air Travel --- United States, April 2006

On April 11, this report was posted as an MMWR Dispatch on the MMWR website (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr).


IDPH has identified two persons who had mumps diagnosed and were potentially infectious during travel on nine different commercial flights involving two airlines during March 26--April 2, 2006. The commercial airline flights identified with a potentially infectious traveler are listed below by date, carrier, and flight number:

Northwest Airline (NWA) flights:

March 26 NWA (Mesaba) #3025 from Waterloo, Iowa to Minneapolis, Minnesota
March 26 NWA #760 from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Detroit, Michigan
March 27 NWA #0260 from Detroit, Michigan, to Washington, DC--Reagan National
March 29 NWA #1705 from Washington, DC--Reagan National to Minneapolis, Minnesota
March 29 NWA (Mesaba) #3026 from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Waterloo, Iowa

American Airline (AA) flights:

April 2 AA #1216 from Tucson, Arizona, to Dallas, Texas (DFW)
April 2 AA #3617 from DFW to Lafayette, Arkansas (Northwest Arkansas Regional [NAR])
April 2 AA #5399 from NAR to St. Louis, Missouri
April 2 AA #5498 from St. Louis, Missouri, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Persons on these flights who have symptoms consistent with mumps within 21 days of travel should be evaluated for mumps by a health-care provider. Health-care providers should remain vigilant for mumps among persons with parotitis or other salivary gland inflammation. Cases of suspected mumps should be reported immediately to public health officials.

A multistate investigation has been initiated by CDC and the state health departments in affected states to notify potentially exposed passengers (i.e., those seated in close proximity to the index cases). This investigation is using a new software application, eManifest, developed by the CDC Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ) to securely import, sort, and assign passenger-locating information to jurisdictions to facilitate timely identification of exposed persons. These data are securely transmitted to state and territorial health departments via the Epidemic Information Exchange (Epi-X) Forum (available at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/epix/epix.html) for notification of potentially exposed passengers.


Steve

Intrepid

Here is the CDC update from this morning:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwr...cid=mm5514a6_e

I find it interesting how the CDC investigators were able to track so many flights. Lots of detective work.

Second, seems that some of the infected pax were frequent flyers with loaded itineraries. Or mileage runners.

Third, mumps spreads by person to person aerosol nose and throat distribution and sharing- sneezing, light oral droplets splashing, while talking face to face, coughing, clearing throat etc. I wonder to what extent the crowded CRJs serve as human to human transmission flying nests... The filtering system in the CRJs will not prevent human to human droplet sharing in crowded environment.

Business as usual

Even better, the Waterloo flyer is a chamber of commerce executive who -- since the flight but before she knew she was sick -- attended lots of functions - including an organized pub crawl with more than 340 people.

Ouch.

dizzy

people who got the MMR vaccine are protected-I assume?

That is one of my least favorite shots of all time-it burns like he**!
-and this is from a guy who gets weekly allergy shots.

Intrepid

dizzy:
You assume correctly. But, Some rare folks don't develop the immunity as expected. Others had the viral exposure long ago and their immune system has forgotten it. In biology exeptions are not rare. It acounts for "diversity".

For myself it turned out a blessing in disguise that UA jacked up the weekend fare MBS-ORD to $1,011... (One thousand and eleven dollars for 222 ground distance miles...). So I decided to stay at my Saginaw house and chill it. No mumps around my 1 acre lawn.