Hepatitis Blog - Surveillance & analysis on hepatitis news & outbreaks

Mar. 31, 2006
CLINIC OFFERED AT YATES ELEMENTARY
By Raviya H. Ismail
HERALD-LEADER EDUCATION WRITER

Amid rising concern about the hepatitis A outbreak, Yates Elementary School parents took advantage of a second clinic offered by the health department yesterday.

Many Yates parents thought at first that they wouldn't be affected because the initial cases were reported only at Mary Todd Elementary.

"At first we didn't get the shot, but then as more cases began to develop we decided to get a shot as a preventative measure," said Irene Johnson, who brought her 4-year-old grandson to get a shot. "I feel better now."

By Barbara Isaacs
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

Three more cases of hepatitis A have been reported to the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department, raising the total number of cases to 13 since February.

All three new cases are adults -- two women and one man. Only one of them has an obvious connection to people who had previously been diagnosed with the illness.

"The other two, strangely enough, do not have any commonality with any of the existing cases that we know of," said Jim Wilkins, a spokesman for the health department.

March 27, 2006
The Produce News
Joan Murphy

Los Angeles County health officials implicated lettuce in a hepatitis A outbreak on a movie set late last year, and now the law firm Marler Clark has filed lawsuits against a caterer and a lettuce distributor on behalf of sickened film crew members.

Workers on the set of "The Good German," a film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, filed a lawsuit against Silver Grill Location Catering and Soleil Produce Inc., said the Seattle-based law firm. According to the suit, Soleil Produce supplied the pre-packaged baby greens on the California film set.

"Contaminated lettuce has been the source of a number of foodborne illness outbreaks over the last five years," said R. Drew Falkenstein, an associate at Marler Clark. "The foodservice industry is aware of the risks associated with fresh produce and needs to do more to protect its consumers."

3/28/2006
By: Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett, UNC Health Care

Long before your mother taught you the importance of washing your hands as she lifted you up to reach the sink so you could wash before dinner, the effectiveness of hand washing was first recognized and described by a Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, in 1846. Hand washing remains a timeless and effective intervention for preventing the spread of infections.

Hands can pick up disease-causing bacteria and viruses from contaminated environments or from an ill person or animal. Most microorganisms (e.g., bacteria and viruses) can survive on the hands for several minutes to hours. If you touch your mouth, nose or eyes with contaminated hands, these organisms can enter your body and cause infections. In addition, when you touch objects with your contaminated hands, you can spread the microorganisms to other objects that you touch.

March 28, 2006

Another Lexington elementary school student has been diagnosed with hepatitis A.

The student attends Yates Elementary, but health officials say they don't think this case has any relationship to three cases of the disease at another Lexington school.

Two kindergarten students and a second grade student at Mary Todd Elementary school tested positive for hepatitis A last week. Health officials say the Mary Todd cases originated from an out of state source.

March 20, 2006
Beaver County Times (PA)
Robyn Russo

Beaver Valley Mall in Penn. Is, according to this story, believed to be the center of America's largest hepatitis A outbreak. In the fall of 2003, tainted green onions used in the mall's Chi Chi's restaurant sickened about 650 people, killing three.

The story says that Kathleen Maher, a 17-year-old Sewickley resident and Quigley Catholic High School junior, saw the outbreak as a chance to do some serious scientific research. Maher, the daughter of a nurse and a surgeon with interests in becoming a doctor herself, reasoned that since not everyone who contracted the disease ate at the restaurant, it must have spread due to poor personal hygiene, namely hand washing.

Hepatitis A is one of five human hepatitis viruses that primarily infect the human liver and cause human illness. (There are many other viruses that can inflame the liver which infect us more generally.) The other known human hepatitis viruses are hepatitis B, C, D, and E. Hepatitis A is relatively unusual in nations with developed sanitation systems such as the United States. Nevertheless, it continues to occur here.

Each year, an estimated 100 persons die as a result of acute liver failure in the United States due to Hepatitis A1. Approximately 30 - 50,000 cases occur yearly in the United States and the direct and indirect costs of these cases exceed $300 million1. The unfortunate aspect of these statistics is that with 21st century medicine, Hepatitis A is totally preventable, and isolated cases, and especially outbreaks relegated to food consumption, need not occur.

Hepatitis A is a communicable (or contagious) disease that spreads from person to person. It is transmitted by the "fecal -- oral route." This does not mean, or course, that Hepatitis A transmission requires that fecal material from an infectious individual must come in contact directly with the mouth of a susceptible individual. It is almost always true that the virus infects a susceptible individual when he or she ingests it, but it gets to the mouth by an indirect route.

Food contaminated with the virus is the most common vehicle transmitting Hepatitis A. The food preparer or cook is the individual most often contaminating the food. He or she is generally not ill: the peak time of infectivity (i.e., when the most virus is present in the stool of an infectious individual) is during the 2 weeks before illness begins. Hepatitis A is spread almost exclusively through fecal-oral contact, generally from person-to-person, or via contaminated food or water.

WVLT-TV Knoxville, TN

A Hepatits A outbreak last year in Campbell County sickend more than 60 people.

Volunteer TV's Eric Waddell updates us on the on-going effort to eliminate the virus from the community.

State health officials are making a final push to get children vaccinated across Campbell County. The reason, the hope is that the spring and summer of 2006 will not hold the same type of problems that happened with Hepatitis A in 2005.

"We have not had a new case of Hepatitis A in Campbell County since September of last year, so we are very encouraged that the vaccination effort is doing what it needs to do," Sandy Halford from the Health Department said.