Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

Abstract

This paper contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the governance and security of global mobility regimes through a theoretical and empirical examination of the extent to which air transport liberalisation and contemporary practices of infectious disease governance demand a re‐conceptualisation of national borders. Recent outbreaks of SARS and H1N1 influenza, which spread rapidly around the world via air travel, illustrated the ability of pathogens to disrupt patterns and practices of human mobility and directly led to the introduction of new health screening technologies at airports that were designed to restrict the spread of infection and maintain a sanitary border. Yet while medical specialists have debated the effectiveness of the various screening techniques, and privacy campaigners have expressed concern over some of the technologies that have been deployed in an attempt to intercept these disease threats, there has been no exploration of the extent to which recent regulatory and structural changes within the global aviation industry have exacerbated the challenges of safeguarding public health and simultaneously transformed practices and spatialities of sanitary border control by re‐siting national borders within a range of offshore and domestic locations. Drawing on official airport passenger statistics from the UK, this paper contends that, in transforming the spatialities of contemporary patterns of aeromobility, the progressive liberalisation of the commercial aviation sector (and the dramatic rise in passenger numbers, flights and airports handling international services it effected) – has had unintended and hitherto unexplored consequences for the governance of infectious disease mobility and the material deployment of sovereign sanitary territoriality by creating more points through which an infectious disease may enter or leave a country and moving the border inside UK regions.

A model-based tool to predict the propagation of infectious disease via airports

“…36,37 Air travel contributes greatly to the rapidity of communicable disease transfer across international borders and thus federal, state, and local public health authorities must understand and plan for aviation point of entry response to these threats. 5,9,13 The model results presented here resemble those from related modeling studies in that they suggest an important influence of geographic origin of the outbreak on the timing and location of disease introduction into the U.S. during an emerging disease event. 38 In this respect, the range of public health tools available for point of entry intervention (observation, health information distribution, health questionnaires, individual screening, illness response, contact investigations, isolation and quarantine, etc.)…”

“…Since the U.S. essentially serves as a global hub for aviation travel with 88 international arrival and departure points for regularly scheduled commercial flights 27 ; with an additional 113 U.S. airports that received passengers from international charter, private and/or air ambulance flights in 2010, 39 it is not surprising that once a novel infectious disease emerges and begins person-to-person spread near international transportation hubs anywhere in the world, that novel disease will in all likelihood appear in the U.S. within days or, at most, a few weeks' time. Spurred by a rise in global traveler numbers and favorable changes in aviation regulations in many countries, the dramatic increase in the sheer number of aviation international arrival and departure points located within geographically and politically distinct entities, 9 has resulted in the creation of new pathways for passengers e and diseases e to enter into local communities worldwide. Our model could prove useful for those countries with multiple entry points to consider when planning for a pandemic.…”

“…7,8 Due to these health issues, the dramatic increase of international aviation travel and security concerns, the term "border" no longer denotes a static, fixed entity that begins and ends at political boundaries, but instead has been extended virtually to include pre-and post-travel geotemporal space. 9 Because of this global interconnectedness, adverse health consequences and economic and travel disruptions can result from the emergence of rapidly spreading novel communicable diseases anywhere in the world. 1 Whenever global or regional public health threats emerge, countries predictably implement mitigation measures at their international points of entry.…”

Flying high (in the competitive sky): Conceptualizing the role of airports in global city-regions through “aero-regionalism”

“…Globalizing airport facilities require extensive and extended capital investment alongside the place-based accumulation of technological knowledge and organizational and geopolitical power (Graham and Marvin, 2001, p. 21). Aviation connectivity exposes urban centers to the threats of terrorism (Graham, 2006) and enhances vulnerability to global pandemics (Ali, 2006;Budd et al, 2011). Geographically uneven economic development, in addition to localized environment impacts, invoke a complex and contested politics of scale surrounding airport infrastructure (Stevens et al, 2010).…”

Biosecurity: securing circulations from the microbe to the macrocosm

“…The same conduits opened up, promoted, sustained, invested in for the facilitation of ‘good’ circulations provides opportunities – conceptualised in the biosecurity lexicon as ‘pathways’ – for ‘bad’ circulations, to which they are tightly coupled (Dillon and Lobo‐Guerrero ). As tourists travel with viruses, goods with invasive species, animals with infectious microbes, food with contaminates; these things emerge as the dark side of globalisation: a direct result of the active incitement of circulations (Budd and Warren ). Securing the contingent freedom of circulations necessary for the flourishing of a particular form of neoliberal life moves beyond a sorting of the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ (Anderson ; Dillon and Lobo‐Guerrero ).…”