QSS 2009 contacted or attempted to contact 3,112 households; 1,536 subjects declined participation, 142 households could not be contacted and 129 were otherwise ineligible. Thus, the final sample for QSS 2009 included 1,292 respondents, 860 from Southeast Queensland and 432 from Other Queensland for an overall response rate of 41.5%. The sample was nearly DAPT chemical structure equally divided between males and females (50.2%

vs 49.8%). Younger people (aged 18–34 y) were under-represented in the sample; and older people (aged >55 y) were over-represented in the sample; otherwise, the demographics of the participants reasonably approximated that of the general population.9 Responses to the two questions concerning travel and influenza are shown in Table 1; 688 (53.2%) of respondents indicated some level of concern about Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 when traveling and 458 (35.5%)

indicated they would likely cancel their own commercial air travel if they had a cough and fever that lasted more than one day. When cross-tabulating these responses, people who expressed concern regarding Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 when they traveled were more likely than those without concern to cancel their own commercial air travel if they had a cough and fever lasting more than one day (44.7% vs 27.7%, χ2 = 33.53, p < 0.001). Nonetheless, there were 363 respondents who expressed concern regarding Pandemic (H1N1) 2009, but who would not have cancelled their own commercial air travel if they had symptoms selleck chemicals of a viral respiratory infection. Bivariate associations between demographic variables and both concern about and willingness

to cancel travel are shown in Table 2, and the final multivariate models are shown in Table 3. When controlling for covariance and 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase confounding, respondents living outside of metropolitan Southeast Queensland (AOR = 0.589; CI: 0.396–0.874), those with more than 14 years of education (AOR = 0.651; CI: 0.444–0.952), and those with incomes greater than A$100,000 per year (AOR = 0.528; CI: 0.353–0.791) were all less likely to express concern regarding Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 when traveling. There were no interaction effects among these variables. Only age was significantly associated with the likelihood of cancelling travel if a respondent was symptomatic, with younger respondents (18–24 y old) less likely than others to cancel pre-existing travel plans (AOR = 0.469; CI: 0.260–0.847). Previous emerging infectious disease outbreaks, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), had far reaching impacts on travel and tourism, particularly, with shutdown of airline travel during the height of the SARS outbreak.10 Avian influenza has not had the same impact; however, it has raised considerable concern among travelers and government travel advisories alike.