I'm flying from Paris to JFK on Air France next month. I'm a litte concerned...

[Divernan]

11. Travel with a particulate respirator mask.

You can wear it the entire flight, or have it handy for when a fellow passenger starts vomiting and you are quarantined within a contaminated plane for two hours. All this macho, strutting, faux bravado is fine and dandy for posters who will not themselves be on an international flight as this deadly disease continues to spread. I've been thinking about this since the fellow who flew into Texas from Africa and was found to have brought Ebola with him. And it's not just Ebola. The recirculated air in planes is an incubating situation for all kinds of bugs. My last 2 East Coast-West Coast trips have been followed by a 2 week and a three week illness - vicious colds/respiratory diseases which left me bedridden. I will not fly again without a mask.

Keep in mind what happened to all the passengers on a recent flight from Belgium to New York when a passenger repeatedly vomited in flight. Keep in mind that air in cabins is recirculated.

The Newark flight arrived at 12:15 p.m. New York time, and passengers were kept in their seats until 1:50 p.m. as the CDC and local emergency responders “evaluated the situation,” said Erica Dumas, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in a telephone interview.

Vomiting is one of the early symptoms associated with Ebola, along with a high temperature and body aches. The sick passenger was taken to University Hospital in Newark, Dumas said. There he was evaluated for several hours before health officials said his symptoms were not consistent with the virus.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-04/vomiting-man-removed-from-flight-in-newark-on-ebola-fear.html

http://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/?p=7698
Infection Transmission During Air Travel
May 7, 2014

It’s become a familiar site to travelers: airline passengers wearing respiratory masks to filter pathogens from the cabin air. To those not wearing masks, the fashion trend can be discomfiting. Are the mask-wearers paranoid or prudent? What is the probability of contracting an illness on an airplane? And how unique is the aircraft environment when it comes to disease transmission?

It is clear that due to lower air exchange rates and decreased sunlight, enclosed spaces such as buildings and transport vehicles are more susceptible to the transmission of infectious particles than are the outdoors.[1] Aircraft cabins are particularly worrisome due to high occupant densities and long exposure times. Well-documented outbreaks of tuberculosis, influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and norovirus are alleged to have occurred during air travel.[2][3][4][5] All of these diseases are transmitted via either large droplets or aerosolization.[6]

Large droplet transmission is a form of contact transmission in which contaminated large droplets (>5 units of measurement), generated when an infected person sneezes, coughs, or talks, are propelled short distances (<1m) and deposited on a susceptible host’s conjunctiva or mucosa. Aerosolization, or airborne transmission, occurs when residual large droplets evaporate to <5 units of measurement in size. These droplets are then dispersed widely and remain suspended in the air indefinitely. Other modes of disease transmission include common vehicle transmission (food- and water-spread illnesses) and vector-borne transmission (via insects). All of these forms of transmission can occur during air travel, but the large droplet and airborne mechanisms probably represent the greatest risk to passengers.[6]