Screening of Infectious Disease among International Travelers at Airports

An infectious disease can spread from its origin to many countries in a few days by international air travelers. To slow down the spread, health stations may be set up at airports to screen passengers. These stations rely on devices to detect the symptom of the infectious disease, rather than the disease itself. Existing technologies to detect the symptom are not 100% accurate. In addition, travelers who are infected with the disease may still be in the incubation period, or without any symptom. As a result, some infected travelers remain undetected while healthy travelers and travelers with common illness may be wrongly identified as the pandemic’s carriers or infectors. Using no screening as the benchmark scenario, this research tested three different designs of screening systems with different combinations of exit screening at airport of departure, entry screening at airport of arrival and entry screening at transfer airport. The experiment was conducted by means of discrete event simulation, based on the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, targeting air travelers from west Africa to the United States. The performance of the screening systems was analyzed in terms of correct detection rate, missed detection rate, false alarm rate and “other” positive alarm rate. The results show that exit screening brings the biggest improvements in the performance measures. Adding additional screening at the U.S. airports and transfer points in European airports only bring marginal benefits.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV090 Standing Committee on Aviation Security and Emergency Management.
• Authors:
  • Gold, Lukas
  • Balal, Esmaeil
  • Horak, Tomas
  • Cheu, Ruey Long
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air travel; Airports; Communicable diseases; International travel; Passenger screening; Public health; Travelers
• Geographic Terms: United States; West Africa
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; Terminals and Facilities;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01658123
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-00753
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 26 2018 2:15PM