ACSA steps up Efforts to Fight Swine Flu
By Murray Williams, Bronwynne Jooste, and Sapa
All local airline staff could soon be wearing safety masks to guard against the threat of swine flu sweeping the world, and an order has gone out for aircraft crews to monitor passengers closely.
Airport health officers have been assessing passengers and crew on aircraft since the beginning of the week, according to the Airports Company South Africa (Acsa).
In addition, South African airports could soon be equipped with hi-tech thermal scanners to monitor air passengers’ body tem-peratures, so identifying possible cases of the flu that has already taken the lives of about 170 people in Mexico. One death has been recorded in Texas in the US.
In South Africa on Thursday morning, there was just one potential case, after a second suspected sufferer in Gauteng was cleared.
The local woman, Susan Kok van Hersham, fell ill at the weekend after returning from a month-long holiday in Mexico.
But the Institute for Communicable Diseases has said it is unlikely to be possible to ever prove whether Kok van Hersham was in fact suffering from swine flu.
Acsa spokesperson Solomon Makgale said that although they played only a “supporting role” to the national Health Department, possible safety measures included the quarantine of aircraft after they hit the local runways.
Acsa said they would assist the department with a whole range of facilities that could be used in the event of any quarantine.
Makgale said the department’s health officers had been boarding aircraft at airports across the country when suspicions were raised.
“They will assess whether the person has been infected. If there is infection, they will advise us and we have the facilities to quarantine the person until they can later be moved to hospital.
“We have the facilities to quarantine an entire aircraft.”
While additional measures like crew and staff wearing masks could be implemented, the situation had not yet reached this stage.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Barbara Hogan has said that southern African countries have put a response plan in place to deal with possible cases of swine flu.
“I’ve just come back from a meeting of SADC (Southern Afri-can Development Community) health ministers,” she said on radio, adding that the agenda also addressed the supply of anti-viral medicine in the region.
Referring to the recent cholera outbreak, Hogan said South Africa had “fortunately, or unfortunately” had good experience in dealing with outbreaks.
As a result, national and provincial response teams were already in place. “We’ve activated all those response teams at the weekend… we’ve been through this before,” said Hogan.
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