How far does the average airliner travel in a week? How many cities? How many continents? How many passengers might alight to spend several hours at a time in close confines with their fellow humans and, of course, the surfaces of the airplane itself? I have no idea either, but we could dream up some fairly insane upper limits, all converging on basically "all of them" and "tens of thousands."It's hard to imagine a better vector for an outbreak of some communicable deadly disease than modern air travel. Well, it turns out that we had really no idea of just how powerful even that vector is. A study being presented this week at the American Society for Microbiology aimed to find out just how long harmful bacteria can survive in an airplane, chilling on a tray-table or armrest or toilet flush button, with the result being up to a full week. Our friend the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) won the contest, lasting 168 hours on the material of a seat-back pocket, while E. coli lingered for 96 hours on a passenger armrest."Our data show that both of these bacteria can survive for days on the selected types of surfaces independent of the type of simulated body fluid present, and those pose a risk of transmission via skin contact," said study co-author Kiril Vaglenov in a press statement.Of course, cleaning things with any sort of attention could likely have cut those durations down quite a bit, but in the real world the going rate of aircraft cabin cleanliness is up for debate.That said, it bares mentioning that MRSA is really everywhere all the time as it is. 96 hours? The same bacteria has been known to persist out in the open in even a would-be sterile hospital environment for more than 90 days, and there's even a reasonable chance you're hosting some of it right now in the back of your nose. The difference is that airplanes move across the world very quickly and, while MRSA is pretty well saturated here on Earth, the even more virulent and contagious thing that comes after MRSA might take advantage of the same friendly aircraft cabin conditions."Our future plans include the exploration of effective cleaning and disinfection strategies, as well as testing surfaces that have natural antimicrobial properties to determine whether these surfaces help reduce the persistence of disease-causing bacteria in the passenger aircraft cabin," said Vaglenov. His team is currently at work testing the longevity of tuberculosis-causing microbes.Don't hold your breath. Or, on second thought, maybe that's exactly what you should do.
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