A woman fell sick on an international flight en route to Denver in February, quickly developing a high fever and rash.
Denver Health officials met the plane, whisked her off and kept other passengers on board for two hours until they found out the rash was not infectious.
Next year, it may be federal officials who screen ailing passengers on flights to Denver International Airport, and state officials say they are “miffed” about the likely change.
DIA is in line to get a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine facility, possibly as soon as next year, CDC officials said.
The station would be similar to ones operating in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and at 15 other airports, where CDC officials check arriving passengers with sicknesses or rashes, preventing infectious diseases from entering the U.S., CDC officials said.
Ned Calonge, Colorado’s chief medical officer, said he thought states were supposed to deal with that issue using bioterrorism preparedness funds.
“I’m willing to admit we could benefit from experts in travel medicine,” Calonge said. “On the other hand, I do think we’re well prepared to deal with these issues.”
During the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, in 2003, federal health officials said they realized that their eight quarantine stations were not enough to catch the virus’ entry into the United States.
The agency temporarily set up 17 additional substations to screen passengers and distribute information.
“The time it takes to travel from one side of the Earth to the other has shrunk by orders of magnitude in the last 30 years,” said Ram Koppaka, the CDC’s acting chief of Quarantine and Border Health Services.
“We needed to start thinking about whether the systems we had in place were sufficient,” Koppaka said.
In the last two years, the CDC has supplemented the stations with 10 more in cities such as Houston, Boston and San Diego.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
