Travel
Diarrhoea in the aisle and vomit-covered seats: How do flight crews deal with bodily fluids in air?
It’s been a summer of biohazardous bodily fluids on planes. Should you be concerned about flying?
While you might expect to come into contact with germs when flying in close quarters on a plane with hundreds of people, it’s fair to assume that being exposed to blood, vomit, and diarrhoea is not something most people are prepared for.
However, there has been a string of recent incidents that would suggest perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by bodily fluids when flying.
Last week, a flight from the US headed for Spain was forced to turn back to Atlanta after a messy trail of diarrhoea was left by a passenger.
Others on board the plane took to social media to share how the flight crew did their best to clean up the mess with paper towels, an absorbent runner, and disinfectant.
When communicating with air traffic control, the pilot explained he was turning the plane around due to a “biohazard issue”.
After the flight landed, passengers had to climb over seats to avoid the diarrhoea in the aisles.
Vomit and blood in the air
It wasn’t the only incident of bodily fluids in the air this summer.
At the end of August, two passengers on an Air Canada flight were reportedly escorted off the plane for refusing to sit in vomit-covered seats.
An onlooking passenger described on Facebook that two women in front of her were struggling to get seated. They were saying to the flight attendant that their seats and seatbelts were wet.
Although passengers knew someone on a previous flight had vomited in the area, they had been assured it had been cleaned.
“They put coffee grinds in the seat pouch and sprayed perfume to mask the smell,” the onlooker said.
“When the clearly upset passengers tried to explain to the flight attendant that the seat and seatbelt were wet and there was still visible vomit residue in their area, the flight attendant was very apologetic but explained that the flight was full and there was nothing they could do.
“The passengers said they couldn’t possibly be expected to sit in vomit for five hours.”
Not long after, the pilot approached the women and said they could leave the plane on their own accord or would be escorted off the plane by security and placed on a no-fly list.
“The pilot got up and walked to the front of the plane,” the onlooker said.
“Next thing we know Security comes down the aisle and escorted the two ladies off the plane!”
In July, a passenger, on board an Air France flight from Paris to Toronto noticed a smell coming from the footwell under his seat.
“It smelled like manure,” Habib Battah told CNN.
When he investigated, he noticed a wet stain on the floor underneath him.
Battah said: “I said it smells like merde – s***. She handed me wet wipes. I started wiping and it was red – blood red. And it kept coming up red. I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I just wanted to see what it was. After a while, one of the flight attendants said, ‘You’d better go wash your hands, and here are some gloves.’”
He later found out the stain was human blood left from the previous day when a passenger suffered a haemorrhage.
‘I’ve been covering Beirut for 20 years as a journalist,” Battah said. “I’ve lived through wars, airstrikes, seen assassinations, car bombs, and narrowly survived the port explosion. I thought I’d seen it all. I didn’t expect to find more blood than I’ve seen in Beirut on an Air France plane.”
Are bodily fluids dangerous?
“Bodily fluids including vomit, diarrhoea, blood, urine on public transport pose a serious risk of disease transmission of anything from Norovirus to more serious diseases,” Jenna Brown, an Environmental Health Officer specialising in food safety and public health, told Euronews Green.
In cases of spillages of any sort, Brown said the fluid should be treated as infectious to ensure appropriate control measures are in place to protect the health of anyone nearby or any member of staff handling the clean-up.
Effective cleaning and disinfection of the area should remove physical, biological and chemical hazards posed by bodily fluids, but “poor cleaning techniques may spread contamination.”
Brown said the area should be isolated immediately and the bodily fluid removed using absorbent granules specially designed for this task – which also helps prevent airborne transmission of infectious diseases. Finally, the area should be disinfected.
“Any staff dealing with body spill clean up should have appropriate training, PPE & equipment to protect themselves from infection,” she continued.
If the area isn’t properly cleaned, then the risk of transmission is still present.
Prior to Covid-19, planes were given a simple clean between flights – trash removed and floors hoovered.
After the pandemic, many airlines introduced hospital-grade air filtration that exchanges air on the plane every few minutes. They also apply antimicrobial spray on all surfaces.
Every two to six months, planes usually get a deep clean when they are sent off for maintenance.
While in the air, most flight crews can handle small biohazard spills until arriving back at a hub for a deeper clean. If the spill is large or complicated, the flight could be delayed or cancelled while waiting for professional cleaning.
Even though experts say you might encounter vomit, diarrhoea, urine and blood if a passenger is ill or has an injury, the overwhelming majority of flights have no issues and fear of bodily shouldn’t hold you back from exploring.
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Travel
A 4-year cruise or a €1 house in Italy: Inside the schemes helping Americans skip Trump’s presidency
Searches by Americans for moving abroad soared in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
Following the recent US election result, Google searches for ‘how to move to Europe’ increased by more than 1,000 per cent in some countries.
Searches by Americans for moving to Canada and Australia soared by 1,270 and 820 per cent respectively in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.
The interest in leaving the States has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms.
A residential cruise ship is now offering Americans a four-year ‘escape’ trip while a Sardinian village has relaunched its €1 house scheme.
Cruise company offers four-year escape from Trump
Cruise firm Villa Vie Residences is marketing a four-year round the world trip to Americans looking to skip Donald Trump’s second term as president.
The Tour La Vie programme offers passengers a stay of up to four years onboard while visiting 140 countries – which doesn’t include the US.
The irreverently named packages include a one-year ‘Escape from Reality’ cruise, a two-year ‘Mid-Term Selection’ option, a three-year ‘Everywhere but Home’ cruise, and the four-year ‘Skip Forward’ trip.
Guests would join the Villa Vie Odyssey, a residential cruise ship which set sail from Belfast in September, several months into its voyage.
“We came up with this marketing campaign before we even knew who would win. Regardless of who would have won, you would have half of the population upset,” CEO Mikael Petterson told US news site Newsweek.
“Quite frankly, we don’t have a political view one way or the other. We just wanted to give people who feel threatened to have a way to get out.”
Prices start at a little under $40,000 (€38,000) a year. For those opting for the full four-year escape, single-occupancy cabins start at $256,000 (€243,000) while double-occupancy costs up to $320,000 (€303,000).
The price includes all food and drinks (alcohol only at dinner), WiFi, medical visits, weekly housekeeping service and bi-weekly laundry.
Sardinian village relaunches €1 house scheme for Americans
In rural Sardinia, the village of Ollolai has revived its €1 house scheme, now targeting Americans exhausted by the election.
The homes-for-the-price-of-an-espresso offer has been relaunched for US citizens “worned [sic] out by global politics” and “looking to embrace a more balanced lifestyle”, local authorities write on the village’s website.
“Of course, we can’t specifically mention the name of one US president who just got elected, but we all know that he’s the one from whom many Americans want to get away from now and leave the country,” village mayor Francesco Columbo told US news site CNN.
“We have specifically created this website now to meet US post-elections relocation needs.”
Those needs include slowing down and recharging with Ollolai’s dreamy Mediterranean lifestyle.
“Nestled in pristine nature, surrounded by incredible cuisine, and immersed in a community with ancient traditions in the rare Earth’s Blue Zone, Ollolai is the perfect destination to reconnect, recharge and embrace a new way of life,” the website claims.
Available properties will soon be listed online with prices ranging from €1 for houses needing substantial renovations to €100,000 for those that are ready to live in.
This is not the first time the village in Sardinia has put houses for a pittance on the market. In a bid to halt a steep population decline, Ollolai began selling off abandoned homes in 2018 to people willing to carry out $25,000 (€24,000) of renovations within a three-year timespan.
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Catalonia has said they want to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 holiday lets in the next 5 years.
Catalonia’s recent ban on Airbnb-style holiday rentals breaches EU law, according to a complaint filed with the European Commission by an industry group.
The European Holiday Home Association claims that the ban, introduced by Catalonia in June this year, breaches the provision of services directive.
The Spanish region announced that they wanted to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years. The city has not granted new licences since 2014 but this has not helped to stem a housing crisis, with locals saying they can not find places to live at affordable prices.
Why has Barcelona’s Airbnb ban been challenged?
“We are convinced that EU law has not been respected,” Viktorija Molnar, Secretary General of the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), said in a statement released on Wednesday.
“By submitting the EU complaint, we hope that the European Commission will take a step further and open a formal infringement procedure against Spain,” added Molnar, whose group represents short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Expedia’s Vrbo.
The move follows legal concerns raised by the European Commission itself that restrictions brought in by the Spanish region were disproportionate to the aim of tackling housing shortages.
EHHA argues that “unjustified, disproportionate and unsuitable” restrictions breach the EU’s Services Directive, which regulates a swathe of activities from hotels to legal advice. They also said that claims about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability are “politically inflamed”.
The lobby group may have support from the European Commission itself, whose officials wrote to Spanish authorities to protest the law in February according to a document seen by Euronews Travel.
“The Commission services consider that the restrictions laid down in [Catalonia’s] Decree-law 3/2023 are not suitable to attain the objective of fighting housing shortage and are disproportionate to that objective,” the document said.
Spanish authorities could have also considered less swingeing restrictions and hadn’t offered evidence that short-term rentals were responsible for housing market tensions, it added – noting that there were three times as many empty dwellings as tourist rental properties in Catalonia.
Barcelona is just one European holiday destinations trying to find ways to tackle overtourism.
Cities like Venice have banned cruise ships from stopping on their shores, Athens regularly restricts visitor numbers at the famous Acropolis and Amsterdam is moving its red light district out of the city centre to try and clean up its image.
How the European Commission is taking on holiday rentals
Brussels has already taken action to bring the sharing economy within the regulatory fold, offering new rights to platform workers and hiking value-added tax on short-term lets and ridesharing apps such as Uber.
But the issue could prove totemic for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – who has created the first-ever European Commissioner for Housing as part of her second mandate, set to take office within weeks.
She has told Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen to “tackle systemic issues with short-term accommodation rentals”, in a mission letter that handed him the housing brief alongside responsibility for energy policy.
A spokesperson for the Catalan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CORRECTION(20 November, 10:02): corrects spelling of Molnar’s name
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The move has been criticised by other tech companies who have branded Microsoft as being a “panic mode”.
In opening remarks to a company conference in the United States on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has set the stage for where the company is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) business.
AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.
But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.
Microsoft said last month that it’s preparing for a world where “every organisation will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous”.
Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors”.
Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers.
Microsoft criticised
The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.
Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.
But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user’s behalf.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.
“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.
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