A sudden illness prompted airline officials to quarantine a tour group from Israel at Pearson International Airport Tuesday night.
According to passengers on the Air Canada flight from Tel Aviv to Toronto, eight people became violently ill with flu-like symptoms aboard the plane. After it touched down health experts checked over the 200 people on board and opted to quarantine 75 of them for safety reasons. Three were taken to hospital.
Public Health Agency of Canada spokesperson Alain DesRoche said the trio was suffering from acute gastroenteritis.
Other travellers at Pearson weren't happy, saying they should have been informed of what was going on.
"They actually told us to stay back 100 feet," explained one flyer, Kimberly Stanford.
"They had everybody in their white suits. They got through customs to a certain point and then they were coming back through. They actually passed us with this poor person maybe 40 feet away. So it was a little confusing as to why they didn't have some other kind of procedure to get this person out instead of through the main traffic of everybody if in fact (the illness) was something quite contagious."
Miriam Gordon's son was one of the passengers. She was also unimpressed with the way things were handled.
"God forbid if there was really a medical emergency," she said. "It's scary to see that it was handled in this way."
"Many of the parents were asking for someone, anyone (to tell us what was happening). We didn't even mind that they were held. We just wanted to know what was going on, what the health risk was."
"Half of them were wearing masks and half of them weren't so that's why we were kind of confused. We didn't really know what was going on."
Miriam says her son, who's now back at university, was only given a mask 20 minutes before he was released.
So what should happen during a quarantine emergency at a Canadian airport?
According to Health Canada, officials - made up of doctors and nurses - are stationed at terminals throughout the country, including Pearson. (Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, and Halifax have the others.) They're required to be on site for every arriving international flight.
Their duties include:
- Assessing ill travellers arriving on international flights who are suspected of having, or having been in contact with, someone with a serious communicable disease;
- Assessing the medical and travel histories of travellers who have died in-flight en route to Canada;
- Arranging for the diagnostic assessment of travelers by local health care providers when necessary under the authority of the Quarantine Act;
- Advising appropriate public health authorities when an individual is assessed under the provisions of the Quarantine Act; and
- Maintaining ongoing liaison with the airport authority, other government departments at the Port of Entry, and with local emergency medical and public health authorities.
- Perform visual screening of travellers arriving on international flights from an area affected by this outbreak; and
Assess travellers who are identified by any of a variety of other screening measures, such as thermal scanning, that are used.
Source: Health Canada