Fears Grow in North Carolina, 2 more fall ill

I guess we should keep our eye on Chapel Hill, to see what the virus is gonna do next.

At least this is occurring while the vast majority of students have left for the summer.

Hope the get this cleaned up by Fall before they head to Florida.........

As Martha would say..."that's a good thing"...

Hope they are just being cautious, and this isn't spreading there. I would think it is too warm in North Carolina, if the experts are right that this virus goes sorta dormant in summer weather. North Carolina should qualify for that by now, I would think.

Ping.

Here we go...

NC ping?

Sure! Thanks for the heads up, Az.

NC ping!
Please FRmail me if you want to be added to or removed from this North Carolina ping list.

Given the time since they have isolated this vius and the fact that it has had outbreaks in sub torpical and tropical areas I am not certain we will have a summer dormancy.

Friday, June 13, 2003 12:00AM EDT

SARS patients mostly anonymous

By CATHERINE CLABBY, Staff Writer

When a contagious disease as scary as SARS strikes near home, people want to know who has it. But public health officials won't tell.

Instead they share only vague details. They report whether a patient is male or female, an adult or a child. Sometimes they offer a few facts about where the virus was picked up, on a trip to Asia, for instance, or in a Canadian hospital. But little more.

That wasn't sitting well Thursday with some UNC-Chapel Hill employees who work in the same off-campus building where an unidentified SARS patient, a contract worker, earned his pay until recently. After a meeting Thursday outside the Giles Horney Building, employees said they deserved more information than anyone is offering.

"If we're facing a potentially deadly outbreak, we need to know who it is," said Danny Wagner, a carpenter with the university's facilities services division. "People are just worried about their families."

State health officials say they can't automatically disclose more. Federal law protects patient confidentiality by shielding medical records. State health officials don't reveal a patient's identity unless they conclude that they must to protect the public health, said Chris Hoke, chief of regulatory and legal affairs for the state division of public health.

Also, health workers struggling to track the path of a new virus don't want to scare away ill people who prefer to shun the limelight, said Carol Schriber, a state health spokeswoman. Nor do they want to overwhelm doctors and hospitals with the so-called "worried well," people with no symptoms who fear they might get sick.

"People might start thinking: 'He lived on so-and-so street. I walked on that street. Maybe we went to the same grocery store.' It would not serve anybody well if everyone decided they needed to be evaluated for SARS," Schriber said.

Instead of disclosing names and addresses, state health sleuths use other techniques to trace the potential travels of a virus. After a person is identified as probably sick with SARS, county and state health workers interview them or family members about their travels. Then they zero in on who might have had close enough contact with them to pick up the virus from a cough or sputum left behind on a doorknob.

They contact those people, Schriber said, and tell them to be on the lookout for telltale symptoms. They are told to seek medical care only if they develop them.

"People who have no sign of infection shouldn't worry," Schriber said. "There are no pink pills you can take so you won't catch SARS."

Public health workers in North Carolina sometimes provide more detailed information about a person who could spread a disease, such as a restaurant worker diagnosed with hepatitis A. They might release information on where the person worked as well as what days and times he or she was on the job.

But they don't want to stigmatize an individual when the true enemy is a disease, Hoke said. That is true when a patient has HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, or something entirely new, such as SARS.

"On down the lines of history, we have consistently proven that we overreact," Hoke said. "If you don't learn from history, you get burned."

http://newsobserver.com/news/story/...p-2425146c.html

Thanks for the ping.

Sanitize, fellow Carolinians!

Seriously, wash your hands,
sanitize and keep you hands away your face.

The NC Dept of Health is getting its chance to test
all that preparedness Sue Myrick has been bragging about.

I'm outta here, heading for the mountain house!

Most companies in the state have a travel policy,
Quarantine after return from infected areas.

Not this guy's?

Watching this closely. My co-worker's husband is working in the building where this 'outbreak' is occuring. His immediate supervisor has been sent home for 3 days (but not 'quarantined') due to a fever.

New SARS blow
Toronto downgraded to `C' after North Carolina SARS case
Health officials confident worst of third outbreak is over
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...ol=968793972154

Toronto is getting another punch from SARS.

As of today, the city is designated an area with "Pattern C" transmission of SARS by the World Health Organization, which lacks confidence in the way the city traces people who've been exposed to the disease.

An American who took SARS back home to North Carolina triggered the downgrade.

.....snip

WHO, the Geneva-based agency, is downgrading Toronto to a "Pattern C" because a North Carolina man visited Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto on May 16 and 17, then came down with SARS symptoms almost a week later.

The North Carolina man's connection to the Toronto outbreak wasn't immediately apparent, although officials have now traced his exposure back to a woman who was also visiting the hospital and was later diagnosed with SARS.

The confusion stemmed from when the woman first started showing SARS symptoms. The American remains under quarantine and is improving, but two of the man's work colleagues are suffering from respiratory symptoms and are in isolation.

Toronto is already on the WHO's affected list, as an "area with recent local transmission."

Areas affected by SARS are separated into three categories ? A, B and C ? which describe the transmission of the disease in that country. A "Pattern A" country has SARS cases that passed from patients to health-care workers. In "Pattern B" countries, SARS passed from patients to health-care workers and on to their family members.

Transmission in "Pattern C" countries has passed from patients to health-care workers to their family members and on to people who aren't readily recognized as having come into contact with known SARS cases.

Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Tianjin and Taiwan, all classified as "Pattern C" areas, do have travel advisories.

While Dr. Andrew Simor, a Sunnybrook microbiologist, understood the reason for WHO's decision, he fears people won't know the difference between being categorized as a "Pattern C" and being on the travel advisory.

excerpted

The case of an American who caught SARS in Toronto generated more fallout yesterday with fears of a possible outbreak at his North Carolina workplace and a slap on the wrist of sorts from the World Health Organization.

North Carolina health authorities put two employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in isolation after they came down with respiratory symptoms serious enough for one to end up in hospital. They both worked in the same building as the SARS patient, who went to work for three days before coming down with the illness.
Officials said it seems unlikely that either person contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome.

But the affair has nevertheless alarmed many people on campus, said Pete Reinhardt, the university's director of environmental health and safety.
"It's a new disease, it's a disease we don't know much about, it's new to North Carolina, it's been in the news, it's got a high mortality rate," he said in a telephone interview.

"So people are justifiably concerned about this kind of new risk."

Meanwhile, the WHO ratcheted up its rating of Toronto's outbreak to "pattern C," the second most serious, because authorities failed to identify the North Carolina man as a potential SARS contact before he got sick.

Also, more evidence trickled in that a cluster of cases in Whitby, east of Toronto, is not SARS and Health Canada said experts are close to identifying the elusive cause of the city's latest outbreak.

The 47-year-old business consultant from North Carolina visited a relative at Toronto's Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care on May 16 and 17 and was in the same room as two people later diagnosed with SARS.

He returned home and worked at the university for three days between May 21 and 23 before getting sick, said Mr. Reinhardt.

Samples from the two other men who fell ill, both support staff at the school, have been sent for testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. But one of them was not even at work during the three days. And it appears the other man started getting symptoms before May 21, when the man who visited Toronto returned to work, Mr. Reinhardt said.

There is also no evidence that people without symptoms can transmit SARS, he noted.

"We believe the likelihood [of the disease having been transmitted] and the risk is extremely low," said the university official.
Mark Van Sciver, a spokesman for the state health department, echoed that sentiment, saying "there is no evidence there is a link at this point."

The WHO alerted Health Canada that it would be bumping up its classification of Toronto's outbreak to pattern C, because tracing by public health officials failed to identify the U.S. resident as a SARS contact.
The two people in the Baycrest room were identified as SARS patients when the new outbreak stemming from Toronto's North York General Hospital was identified on May 23. The American started feeling sick days later, and only then was the source traced back to the Toronto hospital.

"What [the new classification] is telling us is that in their judgment, one or more people who should have been contacted were not contacted," said Paul Gully, a spokesman for Health Canada.

Ontario government officials were not available for comment.
Dr. Gully said the WHO rating is one factor considered by the organization in deciding whether to impose a new travel advisory against Toronto. But he said the UN agency has not indicated that it is on the verge of imposing such a directive.

Dr. Gully also said that a team of Toronto, Ontario, Health Canada and CDC experts is close to determining how the North York General cluster began, but is not quite ready to announce its findings. The outbreak has been traced as far back as a 96-year-old surgery patient, but how he got the disease has been a mystery.

Meanwhile, experts believe they will soon rule out SARS out as a factor for a cluster of respiratory illness cases under investigation at Colonial Retirement Home in Whitby, said the Durham Region public health department.

And a mounting number of negative lab tests, little infection of health care workers and other factors are also beginning to suggest something other than SARS made sick dialysis patients and residents of Fairview Lodge nursing home in Whitby, said Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist with Mount Sinai Hospital.

2 related stories:

UNC Workers Concerned About Health After Orange County Man Diagnosed With SARS

Wake County Patient Hospitalized With Respiratory Symptoms

good post, Huckleberry. I get very confused with the conflicting statements by all the experts. Some "experts" say asymptomatic people can transmit the disease, and some "experts" say they can't.

I do not blame the "experts". They have a tough row to hoe right now. There is so much about SARS that they do not understand, and they have to keep us in the "public" from panic and stupidity.

It is very hard, therefore, to assess the situation.

Nervous Virginia Bump

Hmmmm....UNC Healthcare has been posting a lot of job openings lately.......

And it appears the other man started getting symptoms before May 21, when the man who visited Toronto returned to work

"Poor guy," said co-worker Fred Gilbert of the patient who visited Toronto. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Where is the wrong place? I'm not trying to shift any attention away from Toronto but it seems to me if the connection in Toronto between the "man" and SARS is a mystery , and no known contact with the "man" and the new cases in Chapel Hill , and one new case developing symptoms before the "man" returned to work , where exactly is the wrong place ?

Never assume. And the assumption is that in this case it's Toronto.