Airport Screening Of H1N1 To Be Stopped?

One of the reasons that the Swine Flu pandemic is not as bad in India as it is in several other places abroad is due to the fact that agencies swept into action fairly early on and started to screen visitors from abroad at the airport. Whereas in developed countries this is a pandemic, it has been contained for a considerable length of time in India due to the policy of entry screening at airports and ports and mass scale contact tracing.

According to health minister Gulam Nabi Azad, ”We over 45 lakh passengers in 22 international airports have been screened and every third H1N1 positive case in India was identified through airport screening. Then the health ministry tracked down every single person the infected patient may have come in contact with, looking for H1N1 symptoms in them, according to the minister. For this there is in place a team of 225 doctors and 172 paramedics at 83 counters till Monday. Out of 2,026 positive reported cases, 773 were identified through entry screening.

According to a Deccan Herald report, now however the WHO has opined that this airport screening should be discontinued. According to officials, the H1N1 virus has “well established” itself in the community and this screening will not give the desired results. However this is not a direction; it is merely a suggestion; it is up to the government to take this political decision. As of now the screening at airports is to continue till further notice.

In fact the airport screening process just got a shot in the arm with imported thermal scanners or infrared imagers being installed at airports, which will permit airport, transit, public health officials and others to swiftly scan and measure the skin temperature of people as reported by this Times article.

The device works by firstly scanning a large number of people at the airport to isolate those with a fever or high temperature who would then be evaluated further. The imagers can detect temperature differences as small as 0.05. This equipment is already commonly used in the United States, China and Mexico.

Some of these thermal scanners or infrared imagers are already installed at Delhi and Mumbai, now 85 more will be reaching other airports of the country. The cameras will cut time and effort that personnel currently have to expend in manual checking and screening at the airports. The accompanying image gives you an idea of the kind of images that the camera can produce.

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