John Hockenberry, The Takeaway: So, swine flu, or H1N1, depending on how you refer to it, is spreading across the globe, and the World Health Organization says containment is not possible at this point. There are cases from Mexico to Israel to New Zealand, about 60 cases here in the United States. Joining us now is Guy Martin, senior correspondent for security for Conde Nast Traveller. He’s here in the studio. It would appear that at the very least, and we do have the first death in the United States from swine flu, confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 23-month-old child in Texas, that all of these travel locations, these airports and border crossings are in theory potential data collection points for figuring out where this virus, and where this epidemic, is going. But are the tools there for to actually do anything constructive?

Guy Martin, Conde Nast Traveller: I don’t think so. The SARS epidemic in 2003 really was kind of the test case for this and the Canadians deployed a bunch of scanners and did all they could at airports and were just unable to discover actually infected people. The trick is —

John Hockenberry: What does the scanner do? Just describe to me any experience of being in one if I was actually pointed to go into some booth or something.

Guy Martin: I think it takes a couple of seconds. They just take a thermal image of your body and that’s it.

John Hockenberry: And it’s one of those booth things?

Guy Martin: I think it’s a portal.

John Hockenberry: It's a portal. I see.

Guy Martin: I think it’s a portal. I mean, there are different incarnations of this but --

John Hockenberry: And what does it measure?

Guy Martin: Body temperature.

John Hockenberry: Just body temperature period.

Daljit Dhaliwal, The Takeaway: Is it complicated trying to work on technology that would be effective in an instance like this?

Guy Martin: This was developed to discover breast cancer. These scanners were started — the technology was begun that way. We have an array of thermal sensing, military aircraft have it, everybody's got it.

John Hockenberry: So this is just thermal sensing put to an application, which actually isn’t terribly constructive in your view.

Guy Martin: No. It's -- The agents like it and those airports have a kind of throughput that maybe it helps them isolate... It’s a screening thing. It’s a device to help you get people out of the population that you might think are dangerous. But I don't think it's — The World Health Organization did a study after the SARS thing and I don’t think it worked all that well.

John Hockenberry: Short of someone is actually in the stage of like a full ebola bleedout in the terminal, what do you do if someone has a temperature of 104? Do they actually get taken into a special room by security?

Guy Martin: The CDC has got some people at the airports now and I think that what they’re doing is personal screening. There are kind of two methods of screening that I think are very debated in security. One is the personal method, and the other is the mechanical method. That works for terrorism, it works for smugglers, it works for everything. But I think the personal approach is probably going to be better. They’re going to have some people there, some medical professionals there, looking at folks and seeing if there are signs. Questions I’m not sure are going to help all that much.

John Hockenberry: We fall in love with our technology and our sensors and all these data collections machines that we have but Dr. Tony Fauci yesterday on this program was saying that the low-tech observational techniques are at least as powerful. Yesterday we spoke with a CDC quarantine station officer at JFK airport in New York who said that the low-tech stuff is actually more important: observations and questions.

Guy Martin: That is completely the point that CDC is making now and that’s what they’re doing. It’s really, I think, the best way. The human brain is just far more complex than any machine and is going to be able to read more in terms of faces, in terms of facial expressions, in terms of body posture. You know, these kinds of screenings — We can work a long time before we get a smart camera that’s going to tell us can tell us that kind of stuff.

John Hockenberry: Now, People at airports sometimes are, because they’re so conditioned to go through these sensors, maybe don’t ask or answer questions in the same forthcoming way as they might have pre-9/11. Is it possible that these machines and our reliance on them actually encourages the spread because we aren’t relying on old-fashioned techniques?

Guy Martin: The questions that are being asked are really more about pausing the person for the personal screening. I think the personal screening is more of an observational thing. That’s the first part of the answer to your question. Secondly, I’m not sure that the machines, with the throughput that we’ve got in our airports, and let me just talk about volume for a second.

John Hockenberry: Sure.

Guy Martin: Domestically, we’re looking at some stats a little earlier, 679 million passengers inside the United States last year. So any practice that you lay on top of the screening apparatus that we’ve now got, is another complication, another little bit of a slowdown, another little bit of a drag on the economy, and in fact some French officials and some World Health Organization people, again in the follow-up to SARS or in the analysis of the SARS epidemic, thought that all it did was really slow up the economy. The screening at airports had no affect on the spread of SARS.

John Hockenberry: Really? In Mexico, the Associated Press, in Mexico, is estimating that the shutdown of activities in Mexico City alone is costing the economy $57 million a day. There are border closings and increased vigilance in the ways that you’ve been familiar with in the past. What are the costs?

Guy Martin: I think we’re looking at borders in the wrong way. What I mean by that, specifically, is that the virus does not care where the border is.

John Hockenberry: Yeah [laughs]. That’s obvious.

Guy Martin: So it’s going to go with the people wherever the people are going. Because the outbreak accidentally, or in this case the viral outbreak happened in Mexico, obviously there’s a lot of traffic between Mexico and the United States. We are the Americas. And the virus looks at the continent of the United States, if you will.

John Hockenberry: Sure.

Guy Martin: If we can personify or anthropomorphize the virus a little bit, as like an opportunistic thing: “Oh, hey, this dude’s getting on a plane, he’s going here, or he’s getting on a truck. And these people are going to Mexico City. Or these people are coming back.” There is no border.

John Hockenberry: And with more than six billion people on planet earth, there’s an enormous landscape out there for viruses, again to take the virus’ perspective. There’s all kinds of hosts and borders really matter less than this enormous biomass called humanity.

Guy Martin: Well, absolutely. That’s the opportunistic part of is, right? I mean that's the way that that works.

John Hockenberry: So, do you agree with the World Health Organization: Containment is not possible?

Guy Martin: I think each country has to have a response otherwise we’d be crazy. We don’t want it to become a pandemic, I think now it's an "epidemic," right? Classified as an epidemic?

Daljit Dhaliwal, The Takeaway: Does it also raise interesting questions around profiling, as well?

Guy Martin: The profiling is the same. Whether you’re looking for someone that’s sick or looking for somebody with a gun or somebody with a bomb. It’s the same. It is a police technique.

John Hockenberry: And with costs and with uncertainties and indeed when you’re talking about viruses, the number of suspects is in the hundreds of billions, and that’s just what your hand can hold.

Guy Martin: Exactly. It’s not as if you’re trying to isolate a person with a bomb or malicious intent. These are ordinary people. You’re trying to isolate someone medically. That’s a far more difficult sieve to put over the population than just looking for somebody with a knife or a gun.

John Hockenberry: Security is perhaps a state of mind rather than an actual tactic at this point. Guy Martin, senior correspondent for security for Conde Nast Traveller. Thanks so much for being with us.

Guy Martin: Thank you.

John Hockenberry: As we’ve been reporting, the CDC has confirmed that swine flu has killed the first person in the U.S., a 23-month-old child in Texas. It may have you worried about your own child, but here is a takeaway:

Dr. Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, Epidemiologist at the University of Texas [on tape]: It’s a very bad idea just to go to the doctors with a mild fever, because that’s the place to get infected, because everybody will go there with their infected kids and their infected older people. So one of the places that you’re going to be able to catch this virus, if you haven’t caught it already, is the doctor’s office or emergency room in the hospital.

John Hockenberry: Yes, children with mild fevers should not go to the doctor, according Dr. Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas, School of Public Health. She spoke to us this morning and is the author of the book “Level Four: Virus Hunters of the CDC.”