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Travel ban could check SARS spread

     London: Infections like SARS can be curbed by half if a travel ban is imposed, a medical study in Sweden has suggested. In the study published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine, simulated infection scenarios show that banning trips longer than 50 km would greatly reduce the spread of infection, even if 30 percent of the population did not comply. Using data about all inter-city trips carried out by 17,000 individuals during two assigned months, Martin Camitz, from the Swedish Institute for Infectious Diseases Control and Fredrik Liljeros, from Stockholm University tested scenarios where the infection outbreak started in Stockholm and where travel between towns and cities was subsequently restricted. The results of the simulations show that restricting travel so that all trips further than 50 km are banned would reduce the number of infected individuals by 50 percent and the number of affected municipalities by over 80 percent. "The model and results are robust and there is no reason to believe that the results are not generally applicable to any country or region," the authors concluded.
-Dec 14,  2006

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