Preventing the spread of epidemics at airports
https://www.internationalairportreview.com/article/76873/hand-hygiene-tackle-disease/
According to this article, the spread of epidemics through networks of people at airports can be controlled to some degree by one of the simplest hygienic practices, washing one’s hands. As we learned in lecture, the spread of an epidemic is determined by p, the probability of the disease spreading to another person and k, the number of people an infected person comes into contact with. Airports have high concentrations of people travelling all over the world, making it a relatively probable place for a disease to spread to a new region. With the amount of people at an airport, a disease will likely to spread to some number of people of it has a p value greater than 0. Additionally, with these people travelling around the world, the k value of those that come in contact with a carrier will go up exponentially as newly exposed people arrive at different destinations.
According to the article, past epidemics like the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2009 H1N1 flu made diseases that started with a few patients reached thousands of people over all of the major continents within weeks due to air travel, with the latter disease starting in one small city in Mexico and ultimately causing 300,000 deaths worldwide.
Studies have shown that the spread of contagious diseases can be mitigated by the sanitation practices at airports. In fact, studies further predicted that by raising the amount of people who wash their hands at airports by 10%, there is a 20% decline in the chances of an epidemic spreading. This is because people are making themselves less susceptible to getting a disease, decreasing the value of k that is vulnerable to catching and further spreading a disease. The article concludes by explaining the new, even more efficient hand sanitizing machines being created today and how this will further prevent the spread of diseases into epidemics at airports.