No increased health checks at the airports, despite ASEAN pact

Sari P. Setiogi and Wahyoe Boedhiwardhana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta/Denpasar

Three days after leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed to make concerted efforts to contain Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), authorities here have yet to implement health screenings at the country's airports.

At Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, departing passengers passed through the immigration counter without any screening.

Medical workers stationed at the departure terminal, who were tasked with screening departing passengers, were seen talking to each other most of the time, instead of monitoring passengers.

At the arrival terminal, incoming passengers, including those from affected cities such as Singapore and Taipei, were entering the country without physical examinations by airport health specialists.

"We are not conducting individual checkups yet," said airport doctor Roeselar R.

During the SARS summit in Bangkok, Thailand, ASEAN leaders vowed to work together to contain the pandemic by tightening pre- departure and arrival health screening procedures for travelers in the region, including health checks.

But doctors on duty at the international airport have refrained from conducting physical examinations.

Roeselar said doctors and nurses preferred not to carry out individual examinations due to time constraints.

"We could not ground a plane for too long," he said.

However, he said that he personally believed that such examinations were necessary to provide better screening.

In the absence of individual checkups, however, he said, "We rely on the health declaration letter duly signed by the pilots of each flight from SARS-affected countries, including transit flights through such areas."

Roeselar also showed the new version of the yellow-colored health card, which now included a Chinese translation.

"Through experience, we realized that many passengers arriving from China or Taipei cannot read the Latin alphabet, so we tried to improve the card," he said.

As a result, some of the passengers had filled out their cards in Chinese, but the doctors at the airport did not know the language.

But, said Roeselar, the serial number on the card would be of help.

The health card has two parts: Part A, which is retained by an airport health officer, and Part B, which passengers keep.

Meanwhile, the majority of passengers who had arrived directly from Taipei on Friday were wearing surgical masks.

In comparison, immigration officers at the airport were not wearing masks, even though they were at the front line of the fight to prevent SARS from entering Indonesia. Only medical workers who collected the health cards were wearing masks.

An officer, who did not give his name, said that the airport did not provide masks to its employees.

"I heard that the office should actually be supplying masks to us, but in reality, we must buy them ourselves," he said.

At Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, a medical team of ten doctors and eight nurses were assigned to conduct around-the-clock monitoring of incoming passengers, particularly those who came from affected countries.

The team is responsible for the early detection, physical examination and identification of any passengers suspected of being infected with SARS.

However, the lack of sophisticated equipment, such as thermal sensors, has forced the team to rely heavily on their own senses and basic equipment, and has raised concerns as to the effectiveness and accuracy of such a detection method.

"We will never know for sure whether a passenger is infected or not. There is always a possibility that they could have been infected during the flight and since they show no symptoms, they could freely walk out of the airport," airport police chief Adj. Comr. Ekawana said.

As for thermal sensors, state-owned company PT Angkasa Pura II is set to buy the equipment and are expected next week.

Soekarno-Hatta Airport technical operations manager Effendi said thermal sensors would soon be installed there.