COMING AND GOING

Scary Seatmates

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UPRIGHT AND LOCKED

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Scary Seatmates

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Congress might want to address some of the questions raised last week by the news that an Atlanta man with an infectious , extremely drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis defied health officials and flew about the world.

Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer, flew May 12 from Atlanta to Paris, then on to Athens and other stops in Greece. U.S. authorities finally tracked him down in Rome.

Martin Cetron of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said in a news conference last week that his staff and others were " begging and asking him to stay put " until the CDC could get him home safely. The Department of Homeland Security was in the process of adding him to a "no- fly" list usually intended for terrorists when they learned he had already left, flying from Rome to Montreal on May 24. He then drove to an isolation unit in New York for tests, passing without a problem through U.S. border patrol checkpoints. The CDC flew him to Atlanta on a government plane on Monday, and he later flew on a private plane to Denver for treatment.

The CDC is trying to track down anyone who sat within two rows of the man on the long flights: Scientists think any risk is confined to passengers exposed for eight hours or more. Any passengers with concerns can call 800-232-4636 to learn details such as flight and seat numbers, and to arrange testing. Other questions raised by the incident:

· Would the man have been stopped if the no-fly order had been issued before he left Rome? Probably not, since no-fly lists issued by the United States apply only to flights to and from the States or by U.S. carriers.

· Are no-fly lists used by Customs and Border Patrol on the ground? No. However, border patrol at all crossings into the United States were alerted. Officials are investigating.

· What can you do to protect yourself against infectious seatmates? Short of wearing a surgical face mask, not much.

CoGo says: There ought to be a law.

WEB WATCH

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Tracking Ticket Prices

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Bought an airline ticket and been obsessively checking to see if the price has dropped? Don't bother: A new Web site called Yapta will monitor your flight and e-mail you about any price decreases . If you've bought a refundable ticket, claim the difference from the airline. Most airlines will allow you to do the same for a so-called nonrefundable ticket, but most will first deduct a change fee, generally $35 to $100 on a domestic ticket.

The new site can also be useful in tracking prices before you buy . Go to http://www.yapta.com/ to download a free program. Then, while shopping at Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity or most U.S. airline Web sites, you can mark any flights of interest. Yapta will watch the flights you indicate and e-mail you if the price drops.

Other sites also track the prices of flights to a given destination. Travelocity , for example, has a FareWatcher feature that will monitor the fares for up to five city pairs and send you an e-mail alert when cheaper prices suddenly appear. At Farecast ( http://www.farecast.com/) you can find predictions on where prices between two given cities are headed. But Yapta is distinctive because it tracks specific flights , as opposed to just fares between particular cities.