Posted on 01/23/2007 10:10:10 PM PST by neverdem
Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.
Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.
It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medical center: the story of the epidemic that wasn’t.
For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.
Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.
Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.
Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Kind of reminds me of the Global Warming hysteria.
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Oh sure, having a doctor keep working in a hospital day after day for 3 weeks while coughing non-stop was "so sensible". But that's the culture of the hazing-turned-staple-of-socialist-medicine residency system in which Dr. Herndon supervises residents who are forced to work 24 hour days even when coughing non-stop or otherwise showing obvious symptoms of infectious disease. http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/fall05/html/24_Hours.php Guess it would look bad if she stayed home in bed for a couple of days, but most likely it would have given her immune system a chance to fight off the garden-variety cold, and saved the millions of dollars that this idiotic panic cost. No doubt would also have saved a number of her immune-stressed colleagues and subordinates, and countless patients from catching her cold too.
Same thing happened at Childrens Hospital in Boston:
December 26, Associated Press Boston health officials puzzled by outbreak. What Boston, MA, health officials at first thought was an outbreak of whooping cough among employees at Childrens Hospital may have been something else entirely. But exactly what is still in question. It started when a 19monthold patient came down with the classic symptoms of whooping cough. Symptoms include a runny nose, sneezing, slight fever, and mild cough, which can develop into a violent and persistent cough. A laboratory test confirmed he had the disease. Threedozen hospital employees and one other patient tested positive for whooping cough from late September through early November. But further testing, different from the initial tests, could find little evidence of the bacteria. Federal and state health officials joined 8the city in trying to figure out exactly what ailed the workers, all of whom recovered.
Source: http://news.bostonherald.com
"Kind of reminds me of the Global Warming hysteria."
LOL
It is the global warming hysteria.... they might have had whooping cough so the drastic measures were not only acceptable but called for under the circumstances.
That argument works for everything except why we should err on the side of caution and turn Iran into a glass parking lot.
Yes, any sick hospital worker should be sent home to bed, but what about such common sense precaution as wearing a face mask? Also, I have found that sucking on a Vitamin C losenge is very helpful with a persistant cough or sore throat.
Maybe she was forced to use a socialist appointment system to see a doctor.
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