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Road Life

Fight colds on airplane with little common sense

By STEVE HUETTEL
Published August 3, 2005

With planes more crowded than ever, a new product being pitched to air travelers has an irresistible attraction.

Marketers for AirRight, a disposable filter that attaches to the air nozzle above your seat, call their product "the solution for millions of travelers who come down with colds or viruses after flying."

I'm tempted use my best native New Jersey accent and call it "Yeah Right." But for now, let's just say that dodging germs inside an aluminum tube packed with a couple hundred strangers isn't easy.

Ask Barbara Tharp, who retired last year after 33 years as a United Airlines flight attendant and moved to Hudson in Pasco County.

"As a flight attendant, you're probably sick 100 percent of the time but don't (always) realize it," she says. "I was constantly fighting colds, bronchitis or pneumonia." She got well during vacations and is remarkably healthy in retirement.

In one study, 10 percent of female flight attendants reported five or more cases of colds or flu in the previous year - nearly five times the rate of other working women. The odds for regular passengers are much better, but we all know that each airline trip comes with a ticket for the germ lottery.

By and large, the problem isn't air coming out of the nozzle. About half the air blown into most large airliners in flight has been recirculated. And 85 percent of those planes run the air through filters that capture bacteria and viruses. (Many small regional jets, however, don't have the special filters.)

You also shouldn't worry about germs from every coughing kid in the plane, says Dr. Mark Gendreau of the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. The way cabin circulation patterns work, you're sharing air only with passengers a couple rows away, says Gendreau, who published a paper this year on how diseases spread in airliners for the medical journal the Lancet.

Your real risk, he says, is passengers sitting within sneezing range or the ones who leave germs on the armrests, door handles or other surfaces.

Gendreau suggests washing your hands a lot, with water and an alcohol gel cleaner. Keep hands away from your mouth and nose. Turning on your air nozzle full blast, with or without an AirRight filter, can deflect airborne germs away from you, he says.

Don't forget that a crowded airport is as much a hotbed for spreading illness as any airplane. Flight attendant John McCorkle says he never touches the handrail at airport escalators and hits elevator buttons only with his knuckles.

On board, he goes through quarts of hand sanitizer and turns on the air nozzles before each flight using a hand wipe. McCorkle still comes down with a half-dozen ear and sinus infections each year.

He finished a shift of trans-Atlantic trips this week. But if he avoided an infection on the job, McCorkle figures his luck ran out on the trip home to Wilmington, N.C., on a 50-seat jet.

"I could almost touch this guy who was coughing (and) sneezing with no handkerchief," he says. "And that was just on my commute home."

[Last modified August 3, 2005, 00:35:13]