Habitat Contamination - Warning: Rambling Ahead!

This discussion is dependent upon the destination. If you are
sending someone to the International Space station, they will be
trained for months, fully probed, psychoanalyzed, and isolated prior
to launch. If a passenger get the sniffles on launch day, too bad,
he stays on the ground.

If you are sending somebody to a space hotel like the wheel station
in "2001" or the proposed wheel of space island group
http://www.spaceislandgroup.com then your priorities shift to
pathogen (and pest) management. The environment would be somewhere
between a cruise ship and a hospital - nobody wants to stay at any
hotel where there are cockroaches running across the bed at night...
no matter what the view. Anyone oozing blood from every pore would
likely be denied admission at the airlock - along with the rest of
the people on board his transport - but someone with the sniffles
would likely be let in. A destination of that size would likely have
its own hospital.

For a really long-term destination, like a stanford torus or an
Island One, the quarantine becomes more like the immigration process
from the third world to the USA; you get checked for AIDS and Hep-C
and whatever else, and if you have certain diseases you don't get on
board. Hopefully there's no rats.

:) ed

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "victoriatangoman
" wrote:
> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, rmenich@m... wrote:
> > The recent wave of infections experienced on cruise ships picques
> my
> > interest in this topic... Is that recent news item what
> started this
> > thread originally?
> >
> > Ron
> > ******
>
> Yes, those cruise ship reports definitely got me thinking about
> quarantine issue. Reports about AIDS devastation in Africa coming
> out at the same time further spurred my questioning.
>
> We all know that trvel to and from the Habitat is going to be a
> journey taking at a minimum 3 days if the Habitat is at L5 or in a
> 2:1 resonant orbit. Factor in the earth travel time to the launch
> site, rendevouz in LEO, perhaps waiting for sufficient passengers
to
> fill the Habitat shuttle/cruise liner, and I think that we're
> realistically looking at travel times of a week or more.
>
> That said, it won't be as easy to travel to and fro between Earth
> and the Habitat, so I conclude that the human and cultural
> interaction we witness on Earth will be considerably diminished in
> the Habitat. Face to face sales call will be rare, tourists willing
> to spend two weeks in transit for a return voyage will be rare.
>
> If this will come to pass, then will a Earth based quarantine
before
> permission to travel be an onerous condition?
>
> Consider the economics of lost productivity due to colds/flu, as
> well as the human misery (small in the grand scale of things, but
> still very real to those suffering through a cold.)
>
> Who wants to have diarrhea or be coughing up phlem in your space
> suit out at the SPS construction site? Also, consider that in a
> closed environment, colds will sweep through the population like
the
> Norwalk virus does through a cruise ship, or for those parents who
> can relate, how a cold sweeps through a school classroom.
>
> I contend that it would be worth the inconvenience to the very rare
> traveller willing to spend a week on one way transit to insure that
> they are free of cold/flu viruses, TB, mumps, measles, etc.
>
> For immigrants, I would go further. List a number of communicable
> diseases that are to be screened. To inject a bit of personal
> reminisence, when I was in my doctoral program back in the 80's,
> being the youngest one in the cohort, my office companions were
> sympathisizing with my predicament in the age of AIDS. They
recalled
> their own age of abandon and nobody dying from having sex.
>
> Why willingly put up with AIDS, cylamdia, herpres, human papolama
> virus, etc when they can be screened out in Earth quarantine and
> screening?
>
> Taking this concept further; I recall reading a few months back a
> report that listed only 5 diseases that account for almost 60% of
> society's medical costs. Further, only 12% of the population
account