Health authorities are searching for 44 passengers who sat near a woman flying from India to the U.S. with infectious multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
The sick traveler, a 30-year- old Sunnyvale, Calif., resident, took two flights Dec. 13. Health officials are concentrating on American Airlines Flight 293, a 16-hour flight from New Delhi to Chicago, because flights longer than eight hours pose the greatest risk for transmission.
The woman’s multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR TB, is less dangerous than a virtually untreatable form known as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR TB. But authorities are concerned because the patient showed symptoms during the flight that increased the chances of spreading the disease.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been recommending that the airline passengers seated near the woman obtain an immediate test for tuberculosis and a second one eight to 10 weeks later.
Passengers have been tracked to Colorado, California and 16 other states. A spokeswoman for the CDC said she was not sure how many had been reached.
A similar incident occurred last year when an Atlanta man flew to and from Europe with what authorities believed was XDR TB. Doctors eventually downgraded Andrew Speaker’s infection to MDR TB. He was treated at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver.
