Passengers Cheat Flu Scan With Fever Reducers

Nguyen Van Chau, head of Ho Chi Minh City's Health Department, has revealed that many sick passengers who flew to Ho Chi Minh City used fever reducers to fool temperature scanners at the airport. The government has confirmed 26 people infected with H1N1 flu, 23 of whom came by air after traveling in the United States or Australia. State media reports that the discovery of these scanner cheaters led to the detection of several infected cases later.

Comments

Wait...

[fataugie]

How can you call a desired outcome of taking asprin (reducing a fever) with cheating?

Re:Wait...

[interkin3tic]

H1N1 is a bit miffed about it.

Also the statements by the government quoted in TFA makes it sound a little like the passengers did it intentionally because they knew they were sick and would be detained for 7 days.

Sounds to me more like justification for making examples out of people who were feeling unwell. Punishing "cheaters" to send a message goes over much better than punishing "people who took asprin because they didn't feel well, not realizing they had swine flu"

Re:Wait...

[wagnerrp]

It's got nothing to do with swine flu. You're running a fever. You're sick with something. Are you going to be the jackass who sits in a small, cramped aluminum tube for the next 5-15 hours, and risks infecting 300 of your closest friends with whatever you happen to have?

How about a more common scenario. One of your co-workers comes in coughing, sneezing, and lathers their arm in snot before leaning over your desk to see what you're looking at. Do you consider that acceptable behavior, or are you going to go to your boss to force them into taking a sick day and going home?

Re:Wait...

[icebike]

How are you going to develop any antibodies if you never are exposed to this stuff?

We are breeding entire generations that can be knocked on their collective ass by the mildest of flu strains simply because they have been raised in a risk averse world.

Are we any safer?

Re:Wait...

[Fluffeh]

I just spent six weeks traveling through Europe. Yes, I currently have a bit of a cough. I came in and it seems that my temperature was well within the limits as there were no issues with me coming into Australia.

The culmination of my trip was a wedding in Northern Ireland. During the wedding, there was a Caylie (Spelling?) band and the reception hall was soon filled with loads of couples spinning and dancing away merrily. Now, as I was wearing a morning suit at the time, I got bloody hot bloody quickly. Ducking outside (Cold Irish night time) cooled me off quick smart. After a few moments, I went back inside. Rinse and repeat a couple of times. Result? Runny nose and cough in the morning, and a tickle in my throat since then.

While I haven't bothered to take anything for it (I have just had a cough for about a week now, nothing else), the article seems to point that if I took some aspirin for what I thought was a cold, and somehow managed to sneak a case of swine flu into the country on my returning flight, I would be some kind of cheater monster evildoer. People take remedies when they feel bad. Get used to it. I dare say that there isn't a single person that doesn't catch swine flu that doesn't start off thinking that it's a normal cold or a nasty one.

If the only measure for tracking sick people entering a country relies on them NOT taking common medication for COMMON SYMPTOMS then the bloody tracking should be the point of the article, not the few people that did what everyone does when they get sick and then "smuggled" themselves into a country.

*Cranky mode off*

Re:Wait...

[JWSmythe]

    I'd love to see someone like you pursue that. "I'm suing you because you came into work sick and got me sick." ha!

    You know, many carriers aren't even aware that the are.

    Say an employee takes a cab from the airport. He tosses his sport coat on the seat because it's a warm day (but a company requirement to wear one to meetings). When he gets to the office, he puts on the coat, dusts it off (like any self respecting business man would), buttons it, and rubs out the new wrinkles. His old secretary gives him a hug on the way in. He does the whole round of shaking hands with the rest of the members of the meeting.

    When his part of the presentation comes up, he opens his briefcase and takes out a stack of pre-printed documents to hand around. The meeting comes to an end, and he does another round of handshakes, and calls a cab to get a ride back to the airport.

    He gets home, hugs and kisses his wife and kids, and proceeds to toss his briefcase in his office, and hangs his sport jacket in the closet.

    Little did he know, the person in the cab was being taken to the hospital because they were really sick. They were coughing and sneezing the whole time, and running a high fever. Every inch of the back of the cab was contaminated. His hands, his jacket, the outside of his briefcase, all of which contacted the contaminated seat and door handle.

    Now he's potentially contaminated every person he made contact with, as well as the meeting room, and finally the mens room. Sure, he washed his hands after he did his business, but that didn't stop him from contaminating the door handles and the sink he used.

    3 days later, he's sick. 4 days later, his wife, kids, and everyone he met at the meeting come down with the same cold.

    Who are you going to sue?

    Now, a bit more on your topic, a coworker comes in. He has sniffles. Oh my. Allergies, or a cold? He isn't feeling too bad (yet). So some litigious bastard in the next cube catches his cold too. Turns out it wasn't allergies, nor the common cold, but swine flu. You're going to rape him and the company for everything they're worth, just because.

    Sorry, the potential of infection is a fact of life. I've traveled a lot, and it's very very likely I've come in contact with things that have made me sick. I joke about "airplane sick", because it's almost guaranteed a few days after I fly, I'll be sick from something. The more I've flown, the less frequently I've gotten sick, probably because I've built up an immunity to a whole variety of illnesses. While I was flying a lot, and had the luxury, I worked from home until I was better. Sometimes I'd come into work the next day, and 3 to 4 days later, other people in the office started getting sick. That's me showered, wearing fresh clean clothes (no contamination on my person), but I may be bringing my laptop in with me, and it's bag. I have yet to see someone wash their laptop and bag. I never knowingly did it. It may have been a coincidence. Who knows. Maybe I touched a bathroom door in the airport that the previously mentioned business man did, and it carried through on my laptop bag. Maybe we just took the same cab, or used the same self-service check-in kiosk.

Intent?

[causality]

The article doesn't really explain whether this was deliberate cheating. Did any of these folks see a doctor who straight up told them "Yes, you have this dangerous flu virus, please avoid airline travel because we need to contain it?" Otherwise, it's not unusual for people to feel the onset of a cold or flu and take "medicine" (i.e. symptom blockers) so they can feel better and avoid missing work. Is it strange that people might do this to avoid missing a flight (and aren't airplane tickets often non-refundable?) with no intention of cheating anything? I mean, if you stopped random people in the street and asked them, I doubt most of them would even know that airliners have body-temperature scanners.

Re:Fever doesn't spell influenza

[causality]

Fever can be caused by lots of things. H1N1 isn't the only possible fever-inducing pathogen, and you can even have fever without having an infection. Preventing people with fever from travelling seems kind of an overkill.

What you said and the mentality that would refer to this as "cheating" rather than "we need to implement a better way to screen for this, preferably one that fully informs the airline passengers of our intentions" reminded me of a joke. TSA = Thugs Standing Around.

wow

[rand200069]

I thought tylenol, ibuprofen, and the like were pretty commonly used when people get sick. How is this news, besides the fact that they decided to implement a ridiculous screening process that is easily bypassed?

Re:Fever doesn't spell influenza

[megamerican]

While you are correct you missed the biggest point. You can carry H1N1 or any virus for days without showing any symptom including fever.

That makes these scanners completely worthless. The goal of these must be to program people to get used to ridiculous measures for their "security."

Nothing but face-saving

[DNS-and-BIND]

OK, you people have to figure out how things work under a Communist government. The higher-ups want to protect the country from H1N1, all the other Asian countries are doing it. Heat scanners are installed in all airports, with a masked nurse seated nearby filing her fingernails and ignoring the device. We've secured the country! But wait it seems H1N1 cases got through anyway. The higher-ups are furious, they were assured that heat detectors were deployed. Solution? Those shifty foreigners cheated our indigenously made infrared devices. Therefore, no punishment will be meted out as blame has been shifted. Someone always has to take the fall for mistakes, even if they were otherwise fully qualified as health director, head scientist, etc. History is full of officials who got sent to the gulag because they couldn't dodge the blame for something that didn't turn out perfectly.

Re:So doing something to my own body is CHEATING?

[causality]

When did I cede control over my body to the government?

Why, at least since the War on (some) Drugs. You don't own your body if the government can tell you what you may or may not put into it. Likewise, you don't own your consciousness if the government can tell you that there are authorized and unauthorized ways of altering it. In both cases, you are more like a tenant of your body and of your mind, not an owner. That's one of the major reasons why you don't use manipulative social engineering to solve perceived problems, because it sets some very nasty precedents like this. Precedents which later generations, having few or no counter-examples, grow up to believe are normal and acceptable.

If the War on Drugs actually did anything to reduce the street availability of the substances it seeks to control (do the research; it hasn't), I might feel differently about it, though I doubt it because my opposition to it is rooted in principle. As it has failed to achieve its primary stated goals, I consider it completely without merit and its ill side-effects to be unjustifiable. Anyway, to answer your question, yes we have ceded control over our bodies to the government and we did it a long time ago. We traded it for a little safety that hasn't kept us any safer but has guaranteed a steady flow of money to various criminal organizations by means of the black market. Like anyone else who trades what is priceless for something that has a price, we got screwed. Not only is some buyer's remorse in order, it's long overdue.

Re:simple, they were tracked down as sources

[dgatwood]

To all those defending those who traveled while sick: I'm sorry, but if there is a travel ban because of a well publicized disease that is killing people, and you don't feel well, sit your selfish ass down in bed where it belongs. My parents raised me to stay home if I was sick, because it's beyond rude to make those around you sick. The regular flu kills kids and the elderly all the time. This one is much nastier.

There are several very fundamental problems with your logic:

• You are forgetting that most major airlines refuse to allow people to change economy flights on account of illness. The result is that people fly when their tickets say they have to fly. Blame the airlines for their ridiculous flight change policies. Until they change those policies, this entire discussion is moot.
• Even if the airline were willing to change the flight date or the passenger had the money to buy a new ticket, you are still assuming that the passenger would be able to get another flight at a later date. Given how full most flights are, this is not a given.
• You are assuming that people are deliberately trying to avoid getting caught. People who have fevers take cold medicine to make them feel better, not to evade thermal scans. Most people don't even know that they do such things at some airports.
• You are assuming that sick people are always flying from their home to somewhere else. If you get sick while on vacation thousands of miles from home, staying home isn't an option. Your choices are: A. fly back or B. spend potentially several thousand dollars for a last-second hotel room so that you can avoid traveling while sick. Even if you choose to book additional nights at a hotel, you are still risking infecting the housekeeping staff who could spread it to other hotel guests, infecting the restaurant staff while getting meals, infecting the cab driver who has to take you to get medical care because you have no car or other means of transportation, etc.
• You are assuming that the people were sick when they left on the first leg of their flight. This is also not always the case. Illness can come on quite suddenly.

I've been there back in summer of 2005---sick in Italy on the last day of a two week trip---and let me tell you that it isn't fun. I started out the first leg (from Italy to Heathrow) not feeling great but not terrible. It felt like a cold. By the time I left Heathrow, I was feeling miserable. By the time I got to California, it was a good thing my parents were in town visiting and could pick me up where the bus dropped me off. I would not have been able to roll my luggage the three blocks from where the bus dropped me off back to my house. Staying behind, however, was clearly not an option. I was sick for almost two weeks after that, and would have ended up spending upwards of $4,000 to postpone my return that far, not to mention the problem of getting to medical care without anyone there to drive me, the problem of getting food, etc.

While it's a nice idea (in theory) to avoid traveling while sick, in practice, it is a rather naive notion that doesn't take into account the practicality of doing so. One cannot "stay home" if one gets sick while already away from home.

Re:simple, they were tracked down as sources

[Omestes]

You could stay home when other people are sick. Not sure where in the constitution it says healthy people have right to travel when sick people don't.

No one mentioned the word "rights" here, nor is it even a question. Nor is the U.S. Constitution relevant in even the slightest of ways. I really doubt that the Vietnamese, must less most of the world really care one bit about our constitution, nor should they. Countries have the right to restrict foreign travelers, if you break their entry laws, your breaking laws and are free to accept the consequences. This too is fine. If you don't like their laws, no one is forcing you to go there.

Most Government's, including the U.S. have the right to quarantine people for the good of the public health. This is also fine. If you, exercising your rights to be an inconsiderate asshat, endanger hundreds of people, then your rights to travel can, and should, be temporarily suspended. This makes perfect sense.

Can we please stop with this "the Constitution says I have the right to do whatever the hell I please" meme. It doesn't, and it goes against the legal and philosophical trends that lead to the foundation of the US. Your rights stop the second they infringe on someone else's. You don't have the right to be a dick.

Also can we stop with this "The U.S Constitution is somehow universally relevant to other sovereign nations" bull. No one cares. Hell, we decided the Constitution isn't even valid to large swaths of people in the US, or held against their will on US soil. Why should any country treat us differently?