Researchers list top 10 airports for spreading disease
It may not be the coughing, sneezing passenger next to
you on your next flight who is spreading disease, it could be the airport you
just took off from.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Civil and Environmental Engineering department looked at the 40
largest U.S. airports and figured out which ones would be the most likely to
spread a disease in the event of an outbreak in the cities they serve.
They factored in passengers' travel patterns, the
airports' geographic locations, interactions between airports and even
passenger waiting times for their study, published July 19 in the journal PLoS
ONE.
One of the surprises in their findings was that an
airport's ranking on the researchers' list was not necessarily tied to its size
or busyness.
While John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York
and Los Angeles International Airport were first and second on the list,
respectively, Honolulu International Airport ranked third, even though it
carries only 30% as much traffic as Kennedy.
The researchers said that's because of Honolulu's place
in the air transportation network: in the Pacific Ocean, with many connections
to distant, large, and well-connected hubs.
Though Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
ranks first in the number of flights, it was eighth on the researchers' list of
potential disease spreaders. Boston Logan International Airport ranked 15th.
Following Kennedy, Los Angeles and Honolulu on the list
are San Francisco International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport,
Chicago O'Hare International Airport, and Washington Dulles International
Airport. Atlanta, Miami International Airport and Dallas/Fort Worth
International Airport round out the top 10.
Public health crises of the past decade, like SARS in 2003
or the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, have highlighted how easy it is for diseases
to spread around the world, including through air travel.
But existing models, the researchers said, look only at
the final stages of an epidemic and the places that ultimately develop the
highest infection rates.
The researchers say the new model can help determine ways
to contain an infection in a specific area, and can also help public health
officials made decisions about treatment and vaccines in the early days of a
contagion.
"We are currently capable of modeling with some
detail real disease outbreaks, but we are less effective when it comes to
identifying new countermeasures to minimize the impact of an emerging
disease," said Prof. Yamir Moreno of the University of Zaragoza, who
studies complex networks and spreading patterns of epidemics.
"The work done by the MIT team paves the way to find
new containment strategies" because it allows a better understanding of
the patterns characterizing the initial stages of a disease outbreak, he said
in a comment on the research.
The SARS outbreak spread to 37 countries and caused about
1,000 deaths. The H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic killed about 300,000
people worldwide.
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