A radical new research published in a British medical journal suggests international rules that bar potentially infectious tuberculosis patients from flying are too stringent and airline passengers are in fact at little risk of catching tuberculosis from a fellow traveler.

Dr. Ibrahim Abubakar, in his research published in a paper in a British medical journal, says, “Global and U. S. health authorities also go too far in advising testing of passengers and crew on long flights when an infected flier is discovered”.

Dr. Abubakar, of the University of East Anglia in eastern England, looked at 13 investigations into 41 scares that tuberculosis had been transmitted by air travel. A total of 2,761 passengers and crew were screened after potential contact with a TB case, and out of them, only 10 of them showed up positive when using the tuberculin skin reaction test, which meant they had been latently infected by the microbe.

In the study, he also found out that none became actively infected, meaning they developed the symptoms of the disease.

The paper adds, “Efforts to trace passengers deemed at risk were often fruitless and were costly”. His paper is being published in the March edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.