U.S. Barred 33 TB-Infected People From Flying Over Past Year

Sept. 19 -- THURSDAY, Sept. 18 (HealthDay News) -- Thirty-three would-be air travelers with suspected or confirmed infectious tuberculosis were placed on the U.S. government's public health "Do Not Board" list in the first year of its existence, a federal report released Thursday showed.

Authorized under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, the list was instituted on June 1, 2007 by the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security, according to an article in the Sept. 19 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a CDC publication.

"Before June 2007, we had a system to prevent travel which was mostly based on local action," explained Dr. Francisco Alvarado-Ramy, co-author of the report and a CDC quarantine public health officer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. "We have moved from predominantly a decentralized system to a centralized one We're formally tapping all U.S. government resources which add additional layers of protection to prevent persons with serious communicable diseases which pose a serious public health threat from boarding the plane."

In the year after institution of the list, U.S. state and local or territorial health departments asked the CDC to include 42 people on the list, all of whom had confirmed or suspected tuberculosis (TB), including multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB. In the end, 33 individuals met the criteria to be placed on the list. The most requests (seven) came from Texas, followed by California (five).

The issue gained prominence in 2007 after a Georgia man who flew to Europe for his wedding was subsequently quarantined after it was discovered that he had XDR TB. That highly visible case "highlighted some of the vulnerabilities to the existing system," said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's director of division of global migration and quarantine.

Almost half of those barred from flights over the past year were citizens of countries designated by the World Health Organization as TB "high-burden" countries. Two of the individuals on the list were known to have attempted to evade U.S. air travel restrictions, although it is unclear what, exactly, this meant.