SARS...HEP C...TB...Oh My!

"A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 had health officials around the world scrambling Wednesday to find about 80 passengers who sat within five rows of him on two trans-Atlantic flights."

The sheer panic that arisen over this TB infected man who decided to fly across the Atlantic leads me to believe that no one at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention flies very often.

To be honest, I'm kinda surprised that humanity hasn't already succumbed to a horrifying disease.

Let me explain.

In a typical day at work I come into contact with at least 500 passengers. I would estimate that approximately one third of these people are a potential carrier of an incurable, flesh-eating, rapidly progressing disease. Now at least half of these infected passengers are guilty of one of the following transgressions: Nose picking, absence of hand washing, wiping of various fluids on the seat cushions, vomiting on themselves, vomiting on others, vomiting on me, I could go on. The plane itself is basically a germ-ridden tube filled with a menagerie of diseased people. So this Used-Crack-Needle of a plane flies around from city to city, country to country, happily contaminating a good portion of the Western Hemisphere every single day.

Had any employee of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention actually been on a plane they likely would have noticed this and as a result been far less panicked about a simple case of drug resistant tuberculosis. I mean come on, at least they can test for TB.