There were 56 cases of confirmed pulmonary embolism out of more than 130 million passengers from 145 countries.Among people travelling less than 5000km, this gave a rate of 0.01 cases of embolism per million. The rate rose to 1.5 cases per million for those travelling more than 5000km.
Dr Baker was recently involved in designing a study to be conducted by the Australasian Society of Thrombosis and Haemostasis and aviation medicine experts at Griffith University, which he said would investigate such aspects in more detail.