With three people dead and 11 cases from the recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, UMD’s internationally renowned expert on airborne viruses, Dr. Don Milton, joins public health colleagues in an opinion piece in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) calling on the World Health Organization (WHO) to shift its default response to emerging respiratory viruses.
“While the risk is still low to the general public, we are seeing a virus with a high fatality rate transmitting person-to-person,” said Milton, whose research has shown how viruses such as COVID and the flu are transmitted in exhaled breath and has demonstrated the efficacy of masks for prevention.
“WHO should change its default response – the starting point should not be to downplay the risk of airborne transmission until it is definitively proven. ”
Milton adds that the term ‘close-contact,’ used in the current WHO statements, is at the core of the communication problem around airborne viruses. “We need to say clearly that sharing air in the same room is a high risk,” he said.
Milton worked with a group of international experts: Trisha Greenhalg at University of Oxford, David N. Fisman at University of Toronto, Amanda Kvalsvig at University of Otago, Lidia Morawska at Queensland University of Technology and Jonathan M. Samet at Colorado School of Public Health.
The group writes: “The starting point should be the immediate adoption of precautionary measures to reduce airborne transmission, such as respirator use by healthcare workers, [infected people] and their close contacts.” They also recommend WHO include guidelines on improving ventilation, avoiding unfiltered air recirculation and use of portable HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filtration in all enclosed quarantine and transport settings.”
The group also provided more detail to the BMJ article in this substack.
To request an interview with Dr. Milton, contact sph-comm@umd.edu.
The term ‘close-contact’…is at the core of the communication problem around airborne viruses. We need to say clearly that sharing air in the same room is a high risk.
Dr. Donald Milton