On the flight home from Boston on October 15, Aggie and I both caught colds, which took us by the scruff of our necks and shook us like a terrier shakes a chew toy three days later. If blowing snot into soft pieces of paper was an Olympic sport, I’d have earned a gold medal. I hadn’t had a cold in years prior to that. I’m still not over it.
Extreme Mortman has a post about suggested and mandatory hand sanitizing in public areas.
When I’m well again, I’ll rethink it. For now, I also think that airline passengers should have to give breathalyzer tests for flu, colds, and other communicable diseases in order to board an airplane. If you test positive, you don’t fly.
(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.)
UPDATE: Unrelated, but Instapundit also has something else worth looking at.
Most of the colds I have received in the past three years have been from trips involving airfare. What the airlines need to do is have better air filtration systems for their fleet. Currently, HEPA filters on airplanes recycle the air once every three to five minutes.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=1213901&page=1
It is possible to increase the filtration to two to three minutes as it has been done by the Air Canada fleet. Their HEPA filters also handle the smaller particulates and microbials such as bacteria and viruses.
http://www.aircanada.com/en/travelinfo/onboard/healthtips.html
Most airlines have just been too cheap to update their planes filtration systems to the newer HEPA filters.
Thanks for the Instapundit piece. Like most stories, there is little follow-up from the original article. It’s no surprise that these things get pushed to the back pages; people like their news new, I guess, even to the detriment of the quality of old news information.
One thing always bothered me; what makes the government think that a legal program is so hidden that terrorists don’t know about it? Are people saying that the NYTimes endangered national security by tipping off low-level terrorists who don’t pay attention to such financial details? Somehow I think the program was designed to get at the mid to high level terrorists, the ones with larger financial networks.