Japanese government to stop onboard flu checks of arriving airline passengers

Good news for tourists coming to Japan that are worried about having their vacation ruined by a forced quarantine:

“We need to shift the focus of our human resources from quarantine efforts to domestic countermeasures,” Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Yoichi Masuzoe said at a hastily arranged press conference Monday.

“That doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to detect infected people at our airports, but we have limited human resources available,” he said Tuesday, adding he wants to divert some medical personnel involved in quarantine checks to efforts across the country to grapple with the new flu.

The checks of passengers on flights from Mexico, the United States and Canada–the countries that have been hit hardest by the new strain of the H1N1 virus–could end by the end of this week.

Resources will be redirected to fever centers and local governments.

Domestic flu infections had reached 193 as of this morning, with the outbreak limited to the Kansai area.

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