Spraying insecticide on plane leaves passenger ill and angry

By Bruce Mohl, Globe Staff, 09/22/02

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Adriana Coley of Hyde Park looked forward with eager anticipation to her daughter's wedding as her plane touched down in late July at the airport in Kingston, Jamaica.

But Coley's feelings of joy quickly gave way to horror as a Jamaican official boarded her plane and began spraying insecticide around the cabin.

Coley, who says she has multiple chemical sensitivities, grabbed the can out of the man's hand and begged him to stop. "I'm allergic to this," she recalls shouting. "You're going to kill me."

The official ignored her, she said. He took back the can and continued spraying the cabin. It wasn't long before Coley felt dizzy. Later, she developed a severe headache, lost her voice, and struggled with diarrhea and vomiting. "I just barely made it through my daughter's wedding," she said. She still hasn't recovered.

The incident highlights a side of traveling abroad that few Americans ever worry about. More than a dozen nations try to keep out unwanted bugs (the primary concern with planes originating in the United States is mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus) by using insecticides. Only a few countries require that insecticides be sprayed with passengers still on board, but several nations use an alternative approach that can be done with the plane empty.

Jamaica, for example, offers airlines a couple of options. They can either spray before passengers disembark or they can periodically apply to all plane cabin surfaces an insecticide that retains a residual effect for weeks. The residual application is done by men in protective suits with no passengers on board.

Officials at American Airlines say they have employed both approaches in the past, but ran out of the insecticide earlier this year. American officials said they were unable to obtain additional supplies because the insecticide was banned for airline use in the mid-1990s by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Unable to do its own spraying, American said it was required to have its five daily flights to Kingston and Montego Bay sprayed by a Jamaican official with the passengers on board.

A Jamaican official in the quarantine section at the Kingston airport said the policy was changed in late August to allow passengers to exit before the spraying took place. The official said the change was prompted by passenger complaints. American officials said they had requested the change but had no confirmation it had been approved.

According to the US Department of Transportation, six countries require the spraying of arriving planes with passengers on board. They are Grenada, India, Kiribati, Madagascar, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay.

Jamaica and five other countries — Australia, Barbados, Fiji, New Zealand, and Panama — generally offer more flexibility, allowing residual treatments or in some cases aerosol spraying with passengers not on board. A handful of countries, including Indonesia, South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Guam, require insecticide applications only on flights from countries grappling with malaria or yellow fever.

The insecticide used by most countries is permethrin, which was approved for use on airplanes in the early 1990s by the World Health Organization. While the EPA barred its use on airplanes in the mid-1990s, permethrin is still used in the United States in household insect foggers and sprays, tick and flea sprays for yards, flea dips and sprays for cats and dogs, and mosquito abatement products. The EPA has classified permethrin as a possible carcinogen. Exposure is most hazardous for children, people with asthma, and pregnant women.

Michael Brooks, manager of aircraft services for American Airlines, said the airline would prefer no insecticide spraying on its planes, particularly with passengers on board. But he said the airline has to comply with the entry requirements of the countries in which it operates. He said American and other airlines are trying to persuade the World Health Organization to consider less toxic alternatives to permethrin.

"There are people who are very sensitive to it," Brooks said.

The United States stopped requiring the spraying of insecticides on incoming planes in 1979 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined the practice was potentially hazardous to passengers and ineffective in keeping out unwanted bugs.

In 1995, the US Department of Transportation proposed a rule that would have required all US airlines to notify passengers if insecticide spraying was going to take place with them on board and to disclose the name of the insecticide. Because of a sharp drop in the number of countries requiring insecticide spraying with passengers on board, the agency later dropped the requirement.

Bill Mosley, a spokesman for the DOT, said officials were concerned the rule would have been too burdensome on airlines. Instead, he said, the agency posts so-called disinsection information on its Web site at http://ostpxweb.dot.gov. Another source of information is www.kefir.net/spray, which is run by journalists who initially brought the spraying to light.

Brooks said the policy at American Airlines is to notify passengers if an insecticide is going to be sprayed near them, but Coley said no warning was given. She said the flight landed and passengers were told to remain on board while an airport official came on board "to do his thing."

Coley said the lack of warning particularly upset her because she had a mask in her carry-on bag that she could have retrieved had she known about the spraying.

Coley has been using a respiratory inhaler since the incident, but she says her health has not improved. Her 79-year-old mother lives in Jamaica, but Coley doesn't know whether she would ever fly there again.

"To me it's inhumane," she said. "Insecticides are for insects, not for human beings."

Bruce Mohl can be reached at mohl@globe.com.