Flying on American Airlines while having a rare genetic skin condition

[Skeptic Ginger]

Agreed, and in fact that seems to be just what the flight attendant did, to no avail.

And I'm saying their SOP, a simple "must have a Dr note", was a piss-poor procedure. Totally inadequate.

Like I said, I blame management, not the stewards.

And did this woman know she needed the note? She didn't have anything contagious.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

If this reflected any part of company policy, why wasn't it addressed before she boarded?

 

[smartcooky]

It sucks to be this woman, but I wouldn't take her word for it. Produce evidence. Anybody can say anything, "Believe me, this is my emotional therapy chihuahua." People lie. Or they could've Googled it. Maybe there decision was a bit rash.

Looks like everyone else missed it... they didn't see what you did there!

 

[smartcooky]

The article said they could not retrieve their checked baggage. This is so wrong. If a passenger is not on board the plane neither should their baggage. No exceptions. Top terrorist tip. Board a plane with a bomb in your checked baggage. Then get kicked off the plane. Any excuse will do. They leave your checked baggage on board which explodes mid flight.

This should cause a huge red flag to go up. If what happened here with the baggage is current policy for any airline, they need to change it immediately.

 

[Cain]

Looks like everyone else missed it... they didn't see what you did there!

They got, but were embarrassed for my there/their error.

 

[rjh01]

This is nonsense. I don't expect people in the forum to know this but good management and written SOP how to manage it and it isn't that hard.

People with measles are contagious before they have symptoms. People with pertussis look like they have a mild cold for the first week. Why are people so afraid of a skin condition just because it is visible?

They don't need to diagnose it. Mom names the condition. They look it up and see that images match the mother's story. How hard is that?

I half agree with this. Lots of people travel with an infectious disease and are not told they are not allowed to travel. Like a person can get on almost any train, even with an obvious infectious disease without problem. The point being that the mother was very unlucky to be even questioned about the condition.

A person can look at a photo and think that the skin condition looks like what the child has, but is it the same condition? That may be hard to say. Or maybe the photo does not match. Example are these two babies in the links below both have the same condition?

Warning: links contain pictures that may upset certain people (a baby with a severe rash).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...irth-with-Harlequin-ichthyosis_fig1_257795539
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...rlequin-ichthyosis-in-the-baby_fig1_263097093

Answer yes, but if you were presented with one baby and looked at the other photo would you agree the baby has the same condition? This is the same condition that the baby in the link in the OP had.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I half agree with this. Lots of people travel with an infectious disease and are not told they are not allowed to travel. Like a person can get on almost any train, even with an obvious infectious disease without problem. The point being that the mother was very unlucky to be even questioned about the condition.

A person can look at a photo and think that the skin condition looks like what the child has, but is it the same condition? That may be hard to say. Or maybe the photo does not match. Example are these two babies in the links below both have the same condition?

Warning: links contain pictures that may upset certain people (a baby with a severe rash).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...irth-with-Harlequin-ichthyosis_fig1_257795539
https://www.researchgate.net/figure...rlequin-ichthyosis-in-the-baby_fig1_263097093

Answer yes, but if you were presented with one baby and looked at the other photo would you agree the baby has the same condition? This is the same condition that the baby in the link in the OP had.

Oh for pity's sake. What did you look for, worst possible case of ichthyosis?

Your post is trying to create outrage where there should be none.

 

[rjh01]

Oh for pity's sake. What did you look for, worst possible case of ichthyosis?

Your post is trying to create outrage where there should be none.

This post is junk.

Edit. To justify the above sentence look at this link. It is a straight search for ichthyosis images. The links were chosen because they were two of the few that showed the entire body. Come to think of it I could have chosen almost any two photos and leave the rest of the post the same.

Warning. More bad images.
https://www.google.com.au/search?ne.........1....2j1..gws-wiz-img.....0.LPE5F73izpk

 

[casebro]

It was all probably started by the SJW sitting next to her. Probably think she was an antivaxxer spreading Measles. Another alarmist SJW.

 

[bruto]

I suppose one thing to ask (I actually don't know) is whether there are any reasonably likely infectious diseases that look like ichthyosis. A woman and a child who are, to all appearances, healthy except for their skin condition, which the woman explains is ichthyosis. Does it look like something else, something more likely?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

"better safe than sorry" isn't going to cut it for ADA compliance. If their policy is for flight crew to just make judgement calls on the ground with no firm basis, the airline is going to find themselves in some trouble.

I don't really see it as the airlines responsibility to ensure that no one is flying with a contagious condition. They can require that people who know they are contagious with a serious illness not fly, but how are they going to check for compliance? They are not in a position to diagnose or challenge a patient's claim of health.

It is their responsibility to not discriminate against the disabled.

 

[JoeMorgue]

There's a broader question to be asked of how easy it is to catch a contagious disease on an airplane and the answer to that seems to be "It's fiendishly complicated" and every study and article I can find seems to say something different.

 

[JoeMorgue]

"better safe than sorry" isn't going to cut it for ADA compliance. If their policy is for flight crew to just make judgement calls on the ground with no firm basis, the airline is going to find themselves in some trouble.

I don't really see it as the airlines responsibility to ensure that no one is flying with a contagious condition. They can require that people who know they are contagious with a serious illness not fly, but how are they going to check for compliance? They are not in a position to diagnose or challenge a patient's claim of health.

It is their responsibility to not discriminate against the disabled.

Well that's a good mentality to have. "Better to spread an infectious disease across the planet then to be briefly out of compliance with the letter of the ADA."

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Well that's a good mentality to have. "Better to spread an infectious disease across the planet then to be briefly out of compliance with the letter of the ADA."

I fail to see how medically untrained flight crew baselessly ejecting the visibly disabled is a rational way to control the spread of disease.

Flight crew should feel free to inquire about visible symptoms, but should not accuse passengers of lying based on a hunch and eject them from flights.

The ADA is important because the disabled would otherwise suffer numerous indignities and unfair treatment by well-intentioned idiots, like in this example.

 

[Drewbot]

If the disease was a contagious one, the flight staff would be heroes.

Grey Scale was entirely contained in Westeros, and they didn't have to worry about planes and self filtering ventilation systems.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I fail to see how medically untrained flight crew baselessly ejecting the visibly disabled is a rational way to control the spread of disease.

Flight crew should feel free to inquire about visible symptoms, but should not accuse passengers of lying based on a hunch and eject them from flights.

The ADA is important because the disabled would otherwise suffer numerous indignities and unfair treatment by well-intentioned idiots, like in this example.

Because, radical idea here, if someone is on the plane with condition that the "medically untrained flight crew" can't identity and all they have to go on is said passenger's (which never lie and are always factually correct) word, then maybe in some cases erring on the side of "Not flying to potential Walking Smallpox Blanket to another continent and letting them lose" might, just might, be the better overall decision in some cases because in that case we don't accidentally write the opening chapters to The Stand.

"Well we accidentally flew the Andromeda Strain from Beijing to New York and now two hemispheres have their brains leaking out of the tear ducts... but hey nobody's fee-fees got hurt" is not the better outcome in my world.

 

[TragicMonkey]

If the disease was a contagious one, the flight staff would be heroes.

Grey Scale was entirely contained in Westeros, and they didn't have to worry about planes and self filtering ventilation systems.

Yet grey scale was the less deadly form of grey death, and those who contracted the former acquired immunity to the latter. Ironically, allowing the spread of grey scale may have been better for the population than fighting it. They are much more susceptible to a deadly pandemic.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Because, radical idea here, if someone is on the plane with condition that the "medically untrained flight crew" can't identity and all they have to go on is said passenger's (which never lie and are always factually correct) word, then maybe in some cases erring on the side of "Not flying to potential Walking Smallpox Blanket to another continent and letting them lose" might, just might, be the better overall decision in some cases because in that case we don't accidentally write the opening chapters to The Stand.

"Well we accidentally flew the Andromeda Strain from Beijing to New York and now two hemispheres have their brains leaking out of the tear ducts... but hey nobody's fee-fees got hurt" is not the better outcome in my world.

And on the other side we just bar anyone who hasn't had blood work done in the last 12 hours from flying at all. Safety is the most important thing, after all, far better to ground nine hundred million healthy than allow a single sick person to put others at risk!

 

[theprestige]

"Don't worry, it's not contagious," is probably not a claim I'd be interested in accepting from a stranger, without even any attempt at corroboration or supporting evidence.

In fact, our society is full of rules about not letting laymen assert medical truths without oversight. You don't take your partner's word that they don't have any STDs. You ask to see test results. We don't let people returning from certain parts of Africa simply declare that they're Ebola-free. We screen them. We don't let commercial food preparers decide for themselves what's clean enough. We make them wear hair nets and so forth.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Because, radical idea here, if someone is on the plane with condition that the "medically untrained flight crew" can't identity and all they have to go on is said passenger's (which never lie and are always factually correct) word, then maybe in some cases erring on the side of "Not flying to potential Walking Smallpox Blanket to another continent and letting them lose" might, just might, be the better overall decision in some cases because in that case we don't accidentally write the opening chapters to The Stand.

"Well we accidentally flew the Andromeda Strain from Beijing to New York and now two hemispheres have their brains leaking out of the tear ducts... but hey nobody's fee-fees got hurt" is not the better outcome in my world.

What you describe is the situation already. International flights are a disease vector. Flight crews with no medical expertise occasionally hassling only those passengers with visible ailments will have such little effect in the spread of the disease that it is hard to consider it a useful endeavor.

How are flight crews to discern between an ordinary cough and tuberculosis? Is it COPD or SARS? Someone with a cold and rubella? Someone with a skin condition or smallpox? They can ask, and they have no idea if what they are being told is a lie or not. If flight crews really want to stop the ill from flying, they will need doctors to screen patients. Flight attendants following intuition will be both ineffective and needlessly cruel to the disabled.