Sept. 11, 2006 — The drop in U.S. air travel following the fear based oppressor assaults on Sept. 11, 2001 delayed America’s flu season by two weeks, according to a modern ponder.
The finding proposes lessening air travel might influence the spread of a flu virus.
The investigate appears within the October version of Public Library of Science Pharmaceutical.
Analysts included John Brownstein, PhD, of the Massachusetts Founded of Innovation, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Harvard Medical School.
Brownstein’s group followed air travel, flu’s spread, and the flu season’s peak within the U.S. from 1996-2005. For five of those nine a long time, U.S. flu passings crested on Feb .17, donate or take two days.
But after 9/11, the U.S. flu season had a “markedly postponed top, on March 2, 2002, 13 days afterward than normal,” type in the researchers.
The following flu season’s peak was also later than ordinary, coming at the conclusion of February 2003. Discuss travel hadn’t completely recovered by then.
Over the another two years, flying picked up, and flu season returned to its ordinary peak time, the analysts note.
For comparison, France, which had no comparable downturn in flying after 9/11, saw no delay in flu season for any year amid the think about, the researchers say.
September may be the critical month for unused flu strains to enter the U.S. from other nations, the researchers say, adding that U.S. flu seasons begin in October or November.
Brownstein’s team isn’t faulting flu’s spread totally on discuss travel. Flu has been around a lot longer than airplanes, and you don’t need to be a jetsetter to catch the flu.
It’s still unclear exactly how flu seasons work.
But the discoveries “do propose that variances in carrier travel have an affect on large-scale spread of influenzainfluenza,” the researchers compose.
Would forbidding flights stop a major, worldwide flu outbreak? The researchers aren’t beyond any doubt.
Even with a “critical travel boycott” flu might spread faster than vaccines could be made and disseminated, type in Brownstein and colleagues.