The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here column

Air travel has enough problems today without me adding to the list, but just having traversed the continent from West to East then returning East to West, I think air travel has more problems than just a potential terrorist threat. It is dangerous to your health.

Oh, I am not frightened of flying. Long before frequent flyer miles, I racked up more air miles than Lindbergh, but in those days flying was pure pleasure. Today it is pure pain.

The airlines are all filing bankruptcy and cutting the amenities down to a reduced sized bag of peanuts, Yet, the planes are packed with passengers, so much so that sometimes it takes longer to deplane than it does to travel from point to point.

Discomfort in air travel is not only from the intense security checks, even to the soles of your feet, but also from the travel itself. Passengers are sardines pack three to the row in a tight space that would even make a cockroach have claustrophobia. I could stand that for five hours, but it is those other sardines that worry me.

My East to West trip was uneventful, except for a woman passenger seated behind me who coughed and sneezed for three thousand miles. Whatever caused her coughing was recirculated in the plane’s air ducts. I peppered my nose with tree oil, a traveling remedy prescribed by my daughter-in-law, Alisa Knife Duncan, an aromatherapy expert and a frequent flyer.

It is a medical fact that virus particles can travel up to 12 feet through the air when someone coughs or sneezes and airborne viruses are known to travel around freely in an enclosed airplane. I wasn’t seated 12 feet from the cougher and sneezer.

From experience as a newspaper reporter, I knew that veteran coroner and law enforcement officers used Mentholatum, or Vicks VapoRub or Neosporin in their nostrils when working around corpses. On previous airline excursions Alisa’s remedy worked, but apparently this time it was not powerful enough to medicate against whatever the woman was spewing into the air. Forty-eight hours later I was sick.

As of this writing, I am almost back to human wellness status but surely weakened by the experience. I have coughed and sneezed enough to qualify me as a red-nosed Rudolph in the weeks to come.

I was told by medical authorities that what I have is a virus, impervious to any medication that could be prescribed other than aspirin, vitamin C, and plenty of liquids to relieve the suffering.

My nurse friend, Gloria May suggests: "The dry recirculated air (in an aircraft) is of course a problem. Cold germs love, love, love, dry nasal passages." She would have the sick seat mate wearing a burka if she absolutely had to travel.

She also recommends that passengers travel with paper masks which they could whip out at the first sign of a sick seat mate. My dentist, Dr. Geoffrey Stark, was flying East to visit his frail mother and did wear a surgical mask to insure he was protected against germs floating inside the aluminum tube in which he was flying.

Wearing a burka, or even a surgical mask might set off TSA officials suspicions and if a passenger whipped out a mask in flight he might panic fellow passengers, not to mention stewards and stewardesses and the captain in his sealed cockpit.

My solution is to stay at home among friendly germs. All this supports my theory that the earth is flat and ends at my driveway. If God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings.

Wait a minute. Wings? You don’t think what I had was bird flu, do you? (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470 or through his blog: http://www.theduncansonline.com/elderstatesman)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 9:55 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.