Posted on 04/29/2009 3:03:18 PM PDT by dynachrome
HONG KONG, April 29 (Reuters) - Alarmed by the spread of a new swine flu virus, airports around the world have rushed to install temperature scanners to pick out the sick, but the microbe is proving too clever for modern technology.
Experts say an infected person can easily pass through these heat sensors without detection as the incubation period for influenza ranges anywhere between one and three days.
"The scanners won't pick up everyone (with flu), especially if they are too early in the infection ... People who have been infected very, very recently wouldn't show up on the scanner," Mark von Itzstein, director of the Institute for Glycomics at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, told Reuters.
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
signed, Janet Gestpilano
Enter Captain Trips.
I don’t know if elementary schools do this anymore, though I would hope so, but they used to have long sinks that all the children had to use once a day to wash their hands before lunch. I still remember the nasty, pink, granular soap crumbs that we had to use, as well as the needle spray sink heads to rinse off with.
However, it is, or at least was, a particularly good way to prevent disease. It would not be terribly inconvenient during an epidemic to set up a temporary hand-washing station just inside of the secure area, that everybody entering or leaving the secure area would have to use.
Well, the temperature sensors won’t catch all the passengers with flu, but they will catch some of them—maybe as much as half of them. So they are a lot better than doing nothing at all, which seems to be Napolitano’s preference.
M O O N, that spells fun in the tunnels out of New York city!
Hmmm...using heat sensors to pick out sick people, didn’t I see that on an episode of Fringe last night?
They have those at Taoyuan International Airport in Taipei.
Heat sensors will work for all the folks who don’t take fever-reducing aspirin; what about the folks who do take aspirin/motrin/etc?
As I said—better than nothing.
It was certainly a feature of the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" a couple of years ago.
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