Biohazardous Material in "Luggage" on American Airlines ??

Last Wednesday, I flew from Newark Airport to O'Hare on American Airlines and noticed that they were taking unusually long to push back from the gate after everyone was seated and the door was locked. I was lucky enough to have a window seat on the right side of the plane and could see the baggage handlers simply standing beside the baggage truck and not loading any baggage onto the conveyor belt. Although it was totally out of my control, I started to get really annoyed because I would end up being late for my training conference if the plane didn't arrive slightly early or exactly on time. So I kept watching them and was wondering why they weren't doing their jobs.

Finally after about five minutes, the "head" baggage handler arrives (or someone like that) with a scanning device that was required to scan all of the luggage tags before they were allowed to be moved onto the plane. Then another guy with him puts this big blue case on the conveyor belt first before all the luggage and scans it. The case said kryotrans. I was going to take a picture but by the time I got my blackberry powered up again the conveyor belt started moving and it was out of sight.

Anyhoo, by Saturday morning I was terribly sick. I woke up with a horrible sore throat and within a few hours my entire throat was congested and I could feel the germ/virus creeping into my lungs. By Sunday every gland or lymph in my entire neck area was swollen and with fever. I soon lost my voice and got chills and aches from my shoulders to my knees.

I know it's flu season, but I have commuted into NYC from NJ for the past two years on hot cramped buses and dirty cramped subway cars without getting anything more than a cold and work with people who travel around the country and the world on a weekly basis. This is literally the worst I have felt in years.

I was bored at a meeting today and remembered that I wanted to google kryotrans.

This is what I found: www.kryotrans.com...

KryoTrans is a system of temperature-controlled, passive, tamper-evident containers that provide a complete audit trail for the transportation of products and samples for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries

Whether you're shipping samples, clinical trials materials, vaccines, inoculants, blood fractions or any other temperature-sensitive biologicals, KryoTrans delivers an unbroken cold chain and assured low temperature transit at -80, -20, 2 to 8 and controlled ambient

Why is potentially hazardous materials allowed to be shipped on commercial passenger airlines where if the container was to become breached it could pose a health threat to everyone on board?

I am no aeronautical engineer, but I am pretty sure most passenger planes circulate the same air between luggage compartment and the passenger cabin. If not designed to circulate, I am still pretty sure air can pass between those compartments. What if the plane had a non-fatal crash upon take-off or landing that breached the container.

Is it just me or this reckless on the part of American Airlines? Why couldn't they use Fedex?

Interesting and i assume the blue bag had its own cooling system to keep it at the required temperature as stated by Kryotrans.It may have been cheaper to send this package as someones luggage rather than go through protocol to send biohazardous material.Not good and i hope you get well.