As SARS emerged in 2003, attention quickly turned to airplanes, the most likely source of international spread. At the time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received passenger manifests, usually in hard copy, to notify people who had shared a flight with someone later diagnosed with the infection.
In the Internet age, that procedure was hardly ideal. "The paper management of data was problematic," says the CDC's Christie Reed, mainly because of the difficulty of sharing information with other health officials across the country. When the CDC's actions in response to SARS were later evaluated, "there was a recommendation that we develop a better, more rapid system to notify persons who may have had exposure," Reed says.
That's when CDC scientists began to work on eManifest, an in-house CDC database that imports electronic passenger data that the airlines give to the CDC, says Nancy Gallagher, a CDC ...
