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Saturday, September 11, 2004
Wilkes illness still a puzzle
Intentional poisoning, buses didn't cause sickness on field trip

By Monte Mitchell
JOURNAL REPORTER

WILKESBORO

Neither the buses nor intentional poisoning were the causes behind stomach-flu-like symptoms for which 92 Wilkes County schoolchildren and adult chaperones required hospital treatment while on a field trip Thursday, investigators said yesterday.

But the continuing investigation could take 10 to 14 days to find the cause of the students' nausea, vomiting and stomach cramps. Food, blood and other bodily fluid samples were sent yesterday morning to the state public-health lab in Raleigh. It will take time for the cultures to grow.

Beth Lovette, the director of the Wilkes County Health Department, explained some of the process in a letter sent to parents yesterday. She said that the results of the investigation would be shared as soon as possible.

"Hopefully, the cause of this incident can be found," Lovette wrote.

The seventh-graders from North Wilkes Middle School were treated and released from Wilkes Regional Medical Center and Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital in Elkin.

School buses and ambulances arrived at Wilkes Regional about 1 p.m. Thursday, overwhelming the emergency room and sparking a civic outpouring that included a waiting room of patients telling their doctors to leave and go help the children.

Most of the 200 or so seventh-graders at North Wilkes went on Thursday's field trip. Sixty were absent yesterday, school officials said. They didn't check name-by-name to see if all of the students had required hospital treatment but said that it's about six times the number typically absent.

About 100 seventh-graders from Alleghany County's Sparta Elementary were on the trip. None required treatment, authorities said yesterday.

In Thursday's scramble to match up parents and children, officials had initially thought that some from Alleghany were included in the count of sick children, but they clarified that yesterday. They also had said that some students were from West Wilkes Middle School, but they said yesterday that those students weren't on the trip.

The group of 300 was on a field trip to Wilkes Community College, where it attended a morning musical performance and planned to return to another performance after lunch.

The guests from Alleghany County were allowed to go to lunch first, at the Kabuki Japanese Steak House, while the other students took a walking tour of campus. An initial assessment has found that only one student from that group became ill, school officials said. Health officials said that it could be a few more.

Almost all the sick came from the second group, including some who became ill in the restaurant parking lot.

"It's definitely odd," said Shirin Scotten, a public-health epidemiologist with the Wilkes County Health Department. "You would think that if you had a group of students come in a restaurant and eat something, the first group would be getting sick first and then the second group getting sick."

But health and school officials continued to stress that they don't know that the cause of the illness could be traced to the restaurant.

"Getting exposed to something and getting sick in 15 minutes is almost unheard of," Scotten said. She said she talked by telephone yesterday with experts in food-borne illnesses and could almost see them scratching their heads.

An information sheet about food-borne illness from the Food and Drug Administration says that in rare cases symptoms may come on as early as 30 minutes after eating contaminated food, but that they typically don't develop for several days or a week.

Inspectors visited the restaurant Thursday and found that it does not pose a health hazard. It had an "A" inspection rating of 96.5 percent when the students ate there. Food from the school has also been sent for testing. Officials are testing water at North Middle and looking for other clues.

Health investigators did rule out the buses as a source of the illness, because so many of the students who were on the buses didn't get sick. The buses have since been decontaminated.

Part of the process is to find things people had in common and to see how those things affected them. Health-department workers interviewed 192 students, some who were ill and some who weren't, and compiled two-day histories of their meals and other activities.

"That's really the key. You have to find out what people ate or what they were exposed to," Scotten said.

Providing some of that analysis to the Carolina Poison Center in Charlotte led it to rule out that someone intentionally put something in the food.

Like the six physicians at Wilkes Regional who left other patients to attend the sick children, health-department workers volunteered to help conduct the patient interviews and do other tasks into the night.

Health officials said they have appreciated the patience of the parents and the students throughout the interviews, in giving blood and in other parts of the investigation. "You really have to get everything all at one time, otherwise you miss out on clues," Scotten said.

• Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at (336) 667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com
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