By Mark Mueller & Mary Jo Patterson
The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
Copyright 2007 Newark Morning Ledger Co.
All Rights Reserved
A Continental flight loaded with 272 passengers from Hong Kong — some of them sick — was kept on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport yesterday until health officials ruled out avian flu as the source of their illness.
The culprit was most likely “seasonal flu,” said Shelly Diaz, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which dispatched a medical crew to Newark. Initial reports put the number of sick passengers at seven.
Flight 98 arrived at 2:05 p.m., but no one was allowed to disembark until about 4 p.m., said Mary Clark, a spokeswoman for Continental Airlines. She said the flight crew noticed “a number of” passengers who appeared ill upon boarding in Hong Kong and contacted authorities.
They were members of a large tour group returning to Quebec, Canada, from a Chinese river cruise, she said. Their final destination was Montreal.
Officials with the CDC’s Global Migration and Quarantine office at LaGuardia Airport dispatched an emergency medical services crew, who boarded the plane and interviewed everyone on board, Diaz of the CDC said.
“They asked (them) about their symptoms, and whether they had been exposed to any sick or dead poultry or birds,” she said.
Passengers interviewed after leaving the plane said the sick travelers had been on a 21-day excursion to China. Traveling together in seven buses, the group had visited the Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square, Shanghai and other cities in China, and took a four-day cruise along the Yangtze River, they said.
Lise Lortie, 58, of Montreal said a number of people began sneezing and coughing in Beijing, where the weather was unexpectedly chilly.
“It was cold there, and many of us caught colds,” said Lortie, who was not sick.
Though she heard coughing on the flight, she thought nothing of it until the pilot announced a health official would be brought on board to check on sick passengers.
Most on board had no idea anything was amiss.
“The first we heard of it was when we landed,” said Susan Blair, a Pilates instructor from Houston. “They said they had a few sick people and had to keep the door closed until someone could be brought on board to check them out.”
Blair said no one aboard was alarmed, though people were eager to get off the plane. The flight had taken 15 hours.
“Like everyone else, I just wanted to get off the airplane,” said John Thompson, 43, of St. Louis. “Everyone was calm, though. We weren’t held hostage.”
The episode amounted to a test run for New Jersey’s Pandemic Flu Plan, which involves the state Department of Health and Senior Services, the State Police, and local health agencies.
State Health Commissioner Fred Jacobs, who monitored the situation from Trenton, said he and state epidemiologist Eddy Bresnitz had just discussed the possibility of avian flu arriving by air. “We talked about a plane arriving at Newark Airport with sick people aboard,” he said.
But after evaluating the passengers, “the CDC was satisfied there were no risk factors for avian flu,” Jacobs said.
Had the CDC determined yesterday’s incident posed a real health threat, passengers would have had to be quarantined at the airport or taken to a hospital, Jacobs said.
“We may have well invoked our emergency health powers to direct isolation and quarantine,” he said.
Health officials in this country have worried about bird flu hitting the U.S. since January 2004. Nearly 300 confirmed cases of avian influenza, with at least 167 deaths, have been reported in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Near East.