Prevention of Communicable Disease Spread in Soekarno-Hatta International Airport: An Evaluation Report in 2016

Introduction: Soekarno-Hatta International Airport has been following the International Health Regulation 2005 to prevent communicable diseases. On-board, each flight should make a report to the controller about health condition of the passengers, and the Health Port Office followed up the information. The Health Port Office used thermal scanner and prioritize the screening for the suspected endemic countries. The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Method: The evaluation started with reviewing report document and continued with interviewing the resource persons. At the end we observed directly the procedure how the Port Health screened for the suspected passengers. Result: In 2016 there were 39,088 international arrivals and 40,925 departures that carried 13,715,505 passengers to and from Indonesia. Among all arrivals, 3117 came from countries who applied meningitis and endemic of MERS-CoV, 983 flights were from endemic of H7N9, 9 flights were from MERS-CoV, and 3752 flights were Ebola endemic countries. The Port Health staffs used the thermal scanner to screen all passengers coming from the endemic countries and applied random checked from all other countries to find passengers with arising body temperature. The method was able to screen one passenger from MERS-CoV endemic countries, 2 passengers from Ebola endemic countries, and one from Zika endemic countries of total 1,510,632 passengers. Apart from the individual screening, several other related issues require consideration, including: transmission of disease on board aircraft; transmission of disease in airport terminal buildings; and contact tracing. Aircrew in each flight should also report when a passenger was sick on board. Conclusion: A major challenge is to ensure adequate resources are devoted to pandemic preparedness planning in the aviation sector, which may not be fully considered in a national preparedness plan.