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Jetsetters are key clues to epidemics

Travellers who bring illness home act as sentinels of disease.

When the first patients with dysentery started trickling into health clinics in Sierra Leone in early 1999, Philippe Guerin wasn't sure what to think. Guerin, a medical epidemiologist, knew that the symptoms he was seeing could be produced by several different pathogens, but resources were slim in the war-torn country, and healthcare workers did not have the facilities to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. As the flow of patients began to swell, healthcare workers collected samples and shipped them to Paris for testing.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on January 30, 2007
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