Airport eye catches body heat

By SIMON COLLINS

Travellers arriving at Auckland Airport from overseas will be screened for Sars using an infra-red camera.

The Ministry of Health will borrow the $150,000 camera from car light manufacturer Hella to screen travellers for a trial period between 10am and 2pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The camera will be in an "unintrusive" position, probably high up where it can monitor faces as people walk from their planes towards the duty-free store.

Anyone with a temperature above 38C will be identified by the colour on the monitor screen and taken aside for assessment by a nurse.

The director of public health, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, said the three-day trial would determine whether it was worth using the camera for as long as the Sars epidemic lasts.

"We want to see what effect it has on traffic flows and see if it actually adds value to the steps we already have in place at the borders," he said.

"If we pick up very few people or none at all, then we may look at not proceeding any further."

Hella NZ managing director Martin Reinbach said his company was not the agent for the camera but was possibly the only local user. After he saw how Singapore was using a similar camera, he offered one free to the ministry for the trial.

The camera lens is made of a silicon-like element called germanium which lets through infra-red energy, which is emitted by hot objects.

Because infra-red energy cannot be seen by human eyes, the camera uses colours which humans can see to produce colour-coded images. The colours can be set to show any desired range of temperatures.

One of the symptoms of Sars is a fever of more than 38C, so the camera will show a different colour for any body temperature above that.

However, the system is not foolproof because most skin temperature is about 2C cooler than the standard healthy body temperature of 37.4C, so the camera will be only an initial screen leading to further tests if people show up as over-hot.

"If you have a temperature of over 38C there is obviously some illness. Most of the time it's flu or some other condition, not Sars," Dr Tukuitonga said.

"If someone is found to have a temperature of 38 and no other symptoms, the nurse might decide they are OK to go home, or they might have to go and see their doctor for some other reason, or they may be considered a possible Sars person, in which case we have arrangements in place to further assess that person.

"So the camera is one step in a whole series of things."

He said the 10am-2pm period of the trial each day had been fixed to cover the arrival of most flights from Asia. However, if the ministry decides to keep using the camera after the trial, it may extend it to run around the clock to include flights from Australia.

"We are told that it could be as high as 90 per cent of the Asian traffic to New Zealand or Australia do the two countries at the same time," Dr Tukuitonga said.