WATCH: How Clean is Your Airplane? You Don’t Want to Know

When the cleanliness of airlines is so problematic that the World Health Organization needs to step in to police the industry, you know there’s an issue. According to experts, the fastest way to spread deadly diseases is via airplanes — especially when planes aren’t being cleaned between flights.

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A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the Federal Aviation Administration says it “doesn’t regulate or inspect cleaning and referred a reporter to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which says it has nothing to do with aircraft cleanliness.”

Related: Do You Deserve to Be “Passenger Shamed?” The 5 Most Outrageous Things We’ve See on Planes

Airplanes — they’re not as clean as you think (Photo: Thinkstock)

And at a moment when Ebola is becoming a global crisis, this amounts to a very scary situation. WSJ’s Middle Seat columnist Scott McCartney joined Tanya Rivero on Lunch Break to discuss the alarming state of cleanliness in the aviation industry, the likelihood of catching a disease on a flight, and how to protect yourself.

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