Why can airplane travel expose you to a high concentration of germs if airlines say the area is cleansed with filters and the plane is cleaned regularly ?
In: Biology
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The pressurization system in any turbine-powered aircraft comes from the engines sucking in outside air. Before the fuel is injected, a small portion of that air is diverted and cooled down and used to pressurize the cabin through the air conditioning vents. The cabin pressure is controlled by monitoring how much air is allowed to escape the cabin. Air in a modern airliner is constantly being renewed by air drawn through the engines.
I think it is more about germs on surfaces rather than dirty air. You are in cramped quarters with a large number of people, and that means touching many surfaces that those with germs have touched. It’s unavoidable.
Even the best filters in the world can’t protect you from the guy with the flu 3 feet away, because a lot of the air (and thus germs) he’s breathing out is going strait to you without passing through a filter first. Additionally, while if you were to pass Mr. Sick on the street or in a building you wouldn’t actually be at much risk for contraction, sitting near him in an airplane for hours is a whole different story. The only way to actually protect everyone from the spread of germs would be to make each passenger sit in their own little bubble, but realistically no one would agree to that.
The people around you will still touch and breathe on things before they can get cleaned and filtered again. Especially little kids. But I’ve had several friends who always used to get sick on flights start wearing masks after COVID and they haven’t had issues since. It seems to buy them the little extra time for the airplane filters to do their jobs.
In addition to your close proximity to potentially ill people for long periods, plus potentially touching dirty surfaces, there are 3 other risky contexts to flying – the crowded areas at security, takeoff, and the period after landing. Many airlines run the ventilation while the plane is on the ground, but the FAA does not require them to do so. How the ventilation is run varies slightly from carrier to carrier.
Yes, the air is somewhat filtered and the airplane is cleaned between flights. It’s still typically a couple hundred people stuffed into a relatively small tube, mostly with maybe a few inches between each of them and at least one other person. Even if every surface in the plane was sanitized to the point of being completely sterile before passengers get on (it’s far from it), hundreds of people get onto it with a lot of germs to share with each other.
Also, your interacting/being in a small space with a lot of people from difrient areas. Expireancing germs from different areas of the country/world.
Your being exposed to the cold from X city when your body is used to the cold from Y city.
You may have gotten the cold from your area already, but now your exposed to a cold from somewhere else’s thats slightly different.
In addition to what other people said, before you get on the plane, you have to go through an airport, which is not cleaning surfaces or filtering the air as much as they do on the plane. If you get sick after a trip, you won’t know whether you got sick on the plane or at the airport.
Remember the entire 6 feet/2 meters distance thing during covid-19? That’s because that’s about as far as the teensy tiny drops of spit fly when someone coughs.
How far are you in an aircraft? A lot less than 6 feet/2 meters.
It’s really that simple.
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