Not all business travelers who become ill or injured at airports -- or simply need vaccinations before the trip -- can expect such quick treatment. Airport medical resources vary widely, from medical clinics with doctors (and sometimes dentists, surgeons, pharmacies and medical labs) to those that rely on airport police and workers trained in emergency medical responses.

Some airport clinics are open 24 hours a day, like those at Kennedy International Airport and Singapore Changi (which has two others that stay open until 2 a.m.). Others, like those at San Francisco International and Vancouver International, are open during business hours. Still others handle only airline employees. Many transfer patients to nearby or affiliated hospitals for treatment after diagnosis.

Deborah DiSanzo, vice president and general manger for cardiac resuscitation at Philips Medical Systems, which supplies automatic defibrillators to 16 airports in the United States, says it displays them in places ''where you can run to them and back in under two minutes.'' That is because the survival rate from sudden cardiac arrest declines 10 percent every minute, to just 50 percent after five minutes, she says.

At the O'Hare International, Midway and Meigs Field airports in Chicago, the lives of 11 out of 21 cardiac arrest victims were saved by passers-by using the defibrillators over a two-year period, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2002. The devices give voice commands to apply the pads to a person's bare chest, plug in the connectors and press the button to administer an electric shock.

At the country's busiest airport clinic, Kennedy Medical Office near the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport, more than 40,000 patients show up a year. They have included a smuggler who swallowed $125,000 that was contained in more than 100 plastic bags; a pilot whose blue-green color blindness caused by Viagra made him misread the control panel; feuding taxi drivers with broken noses; passengers suspected of exotic diseases; and even a cat who perished from smoke inhalation from an airport hotel fire.