Ebola-stricken Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea will keep scheduled flights to Belgium that provide the main link with the outside world, the head of Brussels Airlines NV said after a personal fact-finding mission to the region.
“We’re not a humanitarian organization, but for us to stop flying there would have to be a significant change in the risk pattern,” said Bernard Gustin, whose airline provides the only timetabled services to all three disease-ridden nations. “Disconnecting completely from the rest of the planet would make the problem even bigger.”
Gustin spoke after traveling last week to the Liberian capital of Monrovia, where he said local safety precautions and the airline’s additional passenger screening are proving effective. While Ebola has killed more than 4,400 people and the infection rate may reach 10,000 a week by Dec. 1, according to the World Health Organization, those figures don’t reflect the low number of incidences so far beyond West Africa, he said.
“When you look at Europe, we’ve had about 10 cases, and it was all tourists or doctors or nurses or people in direct contact with sick people in the last moments of their lives,” Gustin said in a telephone interview. “And you need to compare that with the numbers of people traveling every day.”
Brussels Air, part-owned by Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHA) of Germany, Europe’s second-biggest airline group, reaffirmed its commitment to Ebola-zone operations after some of the world’s biggest carriers terminated their flights there.
Aid Workers
Air France is the only other European carrier serving the region, with flights to Conakry in Guinea, though it abandoned trips to Freetown in Sierra Leone in August. British Airways scrapped its Freetown and Monrovia flights the same month, citing Ebola concerns, and Dubai-based Emirates has stopped flying to Conakry. Lufthansa doesn’t fly closer to the disease’s epicenter than Nigeria.
While the Ebola outbreak has inevitably curbed general travel to the region, that has been offset by a surge in trips related to the relief effort, leaving overall demand little changed, Gustin said. Aid workers and people on medical missions now make up a majority of customers on some flights.
The trend has given a boost to the carrier’s cargo operations, with items including drugs and food filling more of the belly space of its passenger planes. As much as 10 percent of freight capacity is devoted to humanitarian supplies carried free of charge, and some aid workers also fly at discounts.
Heathrow Checks
While there’s no cure for Ebola, with only about 30 percent of those catching it surviving, infection requires contact with bodily fluids such as blood, vomit and feces.
Burial practices in West Africa, where mourners come into contact with corpses, have fueled the contagion, and medical staff can become infected while treating the sick. On an aircraft the chances of spread are far lower, given that Ebola can’t generally be caught through airborne transmission.
Even so, London Heathrow airport, Europe’s busiest, this week began screening incoming passenger who have recently visited the Ebola zone, with measures including temperature checks, despite its lack of direct flights there. The steps mirror those being rolled out across five airports in the U.S. - - another country with no airline services to the region.
Brussels and Paris Charles de Gaulle airports apply no special measures, relying instead on screening at the point of departure, as recommended by the WHO. Brussels Air has also consulted closely with the Tropical Institute in Antwerp, a world-renowned body that traces its history to efforts to prevent deaths in the then Belgian Congo -- location of the Ebola River, where the original human outbreak was recorded in 1976.
‘Panic Mode’
Those airlines still serving the Ebola zone have developed rigorous procedures to be applied if a passenger exhibits symptoms after boarding, with the person typically isolated, given a face mask and directed to use a separate wash room.
Flight attendants at Air France (AF) must don gloves, use disinfectant gel, store waste in containers and make inquiries about other passengers the customer may have come into contact with. Parisian emergency services are then alerted to meet the aircraft on touchdown -- something that has happened on seven occasions to date, with all of them proving to be false alarms.
“Ebola is a very bad sickness but a very weak virus,” Gustin said. “While the cases we see are shocking, we know very well how it is transmitted. I hope we keep reason, analyze the facts and get out of the panic mode. The hysteria must be overcome.”
- Source: http://www.bloomberg.com
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