New quarantine center in Logan airport | 11.04.2004 | 08:08:02 | Views: 11712 | ID: November 4 '04: New quarantine stations will be created at Boston's Logan International Airport to give airport screeners and health officials a chance to "evaluate" travelers coming into the US who may be sick, the Associated Press reported Friday. According to the news service, the quarantine station will be in the international terminal and it will have five-staffers "from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who will also train airport and airline personnel on how to detect the symptoms of threatening conditions." Officials at the airport say they understand the announcement comes relatively recently to a growing awareness of a possible bird flu outbreak but that they are more focused on diseases such as tuberculosis. "We are most interested in people with fever accompanied by rash, stiff neck, jaundice, cough or unusual bleeding, and severe diarrhea with or without fever," the officer in charge for the CDC at Logan, Maria Pia Sanchez, wrote to the Boston Globe in an email, the AP reported. "While avian flu is what is on most people's minds right now," Sanchez said, "the most common quarantinable disease we pick up through our quarantine stations is tuberculosis. ... A case of TB can be imported from just about any country." The new station at Logan is in part, a piece of a larger effort by the federal government to triple "the number of quarantine stations around the country" the AP was told by Massachusetts Port Authority spokesman Phil Orlandella.
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