* Officials report no drop in demand for tickets and no health risks in flying
Concerns about the spread of the Ebola virus have so far had little impact on Americans' willingness to fly on commercial airlines, company representatives said Thursday.
That follows a jolt to the travel industry that caused airline stocks to drop this week after a Liberian man who had flown to Dallas was diagnosed with the virulent virus.
"We are not seeing a drop in demand," Victoria Day, managing director at the Washington, D.C.-based trade group Airlines for America, said Thursday in a strongly worded email response to The Record's questions about whether it's safe to fly. "According to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], there is virtually no risk to air travelers, no matter where you fly," she said.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday said the Ebola outbreak in West Africa had sickened more than 7,000 people and killed more than 3,300.
Airline crews and airport workers have received guidance from the CDC on stopping certain ill patients from boarding and what to do in-flight if a passenger is sick. At Newark Liberty International Airport, arriving passengers suspected of having an infectious disease would be taken to the CDC's Newark Quarantine Station in Terminal B, which had three false alarms for Ebola in July and early August, The New York Times has reported. On Thursday, the quarantine station in Newark referred The Record's request for information about more recent activity there to the CDC media line. The CDC did not respond Thursday.
The first person diagnosed with Ebola in this country, Thomas Eric Duncan, 43, of Monrovia, Liberia, flew from Liberia to Brussels on Sept. 19, caught a United Airlines connecting flight to Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C., and boarded another United flight for the last leg to Dallas-Fort Worth, arriving Sept. 20.
Duncan passed through a health check at an airport in Liberia and had not yet shown symptoms when he arrived in the United States. That means people on planes he flew on could not have been infected, the CDC has said. His symptoms began four or five days after he arrived in the U.S. Duncan's condition was upgraded Wednesday to serious from critical.
"There is zero risk of transmission on the flight," CDC Director Thomas Frieden said during a news conference this week.
The CDC is saying on its website that it "does not recommend" that people who were on the same flights as Duncan undergo monitoring for the disease.
Still, United Continental Holdings Inc., parent of United Airlines, said Thursday it is contacting passengers and cabin crew members who were on the flights with Duncan to keep customers fully informed.
The State Department and the CDC have warned U.S. citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone and to take special precautions to prevent infection if traveling to Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Ebola epidemic evokes memories of the SARS crisis 11 years ago. The International Air Transport Association has estimated that the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003 cost North American airlines about $1 billion with a 3.7 percent drop in international traffic. That disease, which can be passed through a sneeze, first appeared in southern China in 2002 and was spread in part through air travel, with an estimated 8,000 cases and 750 deaths, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Concerns about Ebola have not been affecting passenger volume. IATA said Thursday that August worldwide international passenger traffic increased 5.9 percent compared with August 2013, following a 5.4 percent July gain. Travel demand for North American airlines rose 3.2 percent in August compared with that of a year ago, IATA said. European carriers' August international traffic climbed 6.8 percent and African airlines' demand rose 7.5 percent.
Email: newman@northjersey.com