Sylvia's Journal

As we were settling down in our seats at gate E5 at Schiphol yesterday, an elderly Indian couple sat down in back of me. As soon as the woman sat down she started coughing, a rough deep cough not like one that comes with a cold. “TB,” flashed through my mind, not that I know what a TB cough sounds like, but my mind had put India and coughing together.

The woman occupying the seat next to her asked to be reseated and indicated her concern about having a serious cougher in a plane that would be circulating air for the next 7 hours. Other people in the neighborhood agreed with nodding heads. A purser was dispatched and he asked the woman how she was feeling. Fine, she indicated, and her husband confirmed. The purser asked her to put her hand in front of her mouth as she coughed. The couple agreed.

But no one sitting around the couple felt comforted by this attempt at containment.  The head flight attendant was called in. She listened patiently to the complaints, walked up to the couple and said in the sweetest voice, “I hear you are not feeling well.” This was of course instantly denied.

A woman next to me, who was studying Stata, a statistical software package used among others by epidemiologists told me the woman should be taken off the plane as she was a public health risk. And just as she was saying this I was reading the chapter about American public health systems losing their bite sometime in the second half of the 1900s in Laurie Garrett’s book ‘Betrayal of Trust.’

In the end the Indian woman was given a painter’s mask and told to keep it on during the entire trip (she didn’t really) and the crisis was, at least for the duration of the trip, averted. I saw the ‘no bite’ approach of public health in America, demonstrated right before my eyes, along with the terrible dilemma of public versus personal health.