Tuberculosis on planes

Earlier this week there was a news story regarding a 2 hour US Airways flight between Texas and Arizona that carried an individual with tuberculosis on board. While the story made headlines, a few important points were missing from many news stories:

  • There has never been a confirmed case of TB transmitted via air travel
  • A trip of at least 5 hours duration is thought to confer risk
  • The air within a plane is filtered to such a degree that it is likely cleaner than the air in most buildings

A good resource for these kind of incidents is the WHO guidance on this topic.

Meningitis

Last night Dr. Lee Harrison of UPMC discussed meningococcal meningitis at the  Baltimore Tropical Medicine Club. Some highlights included the fact that the US is at an all-time low of meningococcal meningitis (despite the Princeton and UCSB outbreaks) and that serotype X (which there is no vaccine for) has been causing invasive disease in the meningitis belt in Africa. 

The Novartis serotype B vaccine, approved for use in the EU and Australia, is now being distributed to the Princeton University population in an investigational manner. It remains to be seen what the impact of his vaccine, for which no hard efficacy data is yet available, will be at Princeton and the rest of the world. 

Experiment

This is an experiment to see how well I can keeping abreast with (and discuss new) developments in the world of infectious disease and related disciplines. The name of this site, Tracking Zebra, reflects the fact that in the world of medicine most things are ordinary, mundane, and predictable. Horses. However, interspersed among the horses, on rare occasions, are zebras--the novel, emerging, mutated, species-jumping pathogens whose hoofbeats catch those expecting horses by surprise.