Preventing infection on long flights

The cabin of a spacecraft halfway to Mars would be the least convenient place - one cannot say “on earth” - for a Salmonella or Pneumococcus outbreak, but a wide-ranging new paper suggests that microgravity and prolonged space flight could give unique advantages to germs. What’s a space agency to do? Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel offers several ideas.

And no, they are not to add more Vitamin C to the Tang, or to give each crew member a bottle of Purell. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

“I’ve been involved for two decades with trying to prevent infections in the intensive care unit and general hospital settings and I’ve been involved with national and international guidelines, but there are a lot of constraints in space I had never thought of before,” said Mermel, who began investigating the infectious disease implications of space flight when he was invited to speak at a NASA-Johnson Space Center symposium in April 2011.

In all, he said, he’s read hundreds of papers and he cited 91of them in the peer-reviewed article published online Oct. 9 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. He also has consulted widely with experts including Duane Pierson, Chief Microbiologist, Space Life Sciences at the Johnson center.

What Mermel has distilled from the literature is that microgravity weakens the immune system in some ways while it also increases the virulence and antimicrobial resistance of some microorganisms. Meanwhile, without gravity, germs launched by coughs and sneezes no longer fall to the ground within an earthly 3-6 feet, but continue to float around, increasing the distance and time for astronauts to inhale them, or for them to settle on a wider variety of surfaces.

“So you suppress the human immune response, and you enhance the ability of microbes to cause infection, and you put those together in a confined space where airborne particles can remain in the air for a protracted period of time,” Mermel said.

What’s more, in a spacecraft, power limitations prevent extensive air filtration and the air is recirculated. That means astronauts can’t use some hospital disinfectants and hand hygiene products because they could emit hazardous vapors. And like a college dorm room or bathroom, many surfaces in the closed quarters of a spaceship can become contaminated, serving as reservoirs for germs that can spread in this unique environment, Mermel said.

To some extent there is hard data on the risk of infectious disease on space missions. Mermel found NASA statistics showing that there have been 29 reported infectious disease incidents among 742 crew members on 106 space shuttle flights. Although the number is limited, human space flight to Mars would be unprecedented because of the prolonged nature of the mission. Mermel argues that it is unclear if this will introduce a risk of infection beyond what one might extrapolate from shorter missions.