Abstract:
Air travel, by connecting geographically isolated populations, allows disease to spread between them and enables pathogens to persist by reducing the chance of local stochastic fadeout. Air travel now represents by far the most important means for the rapid global dissemination of human pathogens—partly because it is the predominant means of transporting people over large distances but also because the short transit times make it an extremely efficient means of ensuring that even pathogens with very short generation times can be transported over very large distances. These concerns led to work carried out at the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency to determine whether practical measures could be taken to reduce this international spread in the event of a major pandemic with a virulent pathogen, particularly pandemic influenza. Briefly, it was found that air travel restriction will have limited value in controlling influenza pandemic spread.
