Have you ever flown for a vacation and found you were beginning to get a cold or other respiratory infection? How about when you fly for business? Just when you want to be at your peak, you’re feeling congested and beginning to cough. You immediately want to blame the flight for making you sick; after all, being in an enclosed area and breathing all that recycled air in a confined space, you obviously picked up a bug from another passenger. Is that a reasonable conclusion?

The risk of respiratory infection is on the minds of those of us who travel for business and pleasure—okay, maybe not the first thing we think about, but it’s on the list. With the possibility of infections being easy to transmit on flights, it’s a global concern as well. The airline manufacturers are concerned because they provide the delivery systems for billions of passengers. It’s also on the minds of researchers who want to know how infections are spread on planes.

Researchers from Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Boeing Corporation sought to find out. Using prior research as a guide, they created a methodology of how to assess the course of respiratory infections. This is the kind of study research assistants dream about: they got to take 10 intercontinental flights from Atlanta to several West Coast locations. However, they were not just sitting quietly. They had to track the movement of every passenger and flight crewmember for the entire flight to monitor contacts between passengers and crew. And since they were on Boeing 757s, that’s quite a few passengers. Then they had to sample 22 different surfaces per flight.

I’ll let you know what they found on Thursday.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

Reference: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711611115