Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 21, 1991 TAG: 9103210408
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES HITE MEDICAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The disease causes diarrhea, fever, nausea, abdominal cramps and vomiting. Young children or the elderly may become severely dehydrated if not treated properly.
Health Director Donald Stern said he is sending letters to physicians and day-care centers, asking them to watch children carefully for symptoms of the disease.
Parents will be asked to keep children with loose stools or diarrhea at home, Stern said.
Children at a preschool and at a day-care center where cases have occurred will be tested and treated with antibiotics if they have the disease, he added. There has been one case at each.
The dysentery outbreak is caused by a "very infectious" bacteria called shigella, Stern said. The germ typically is spread when infected persons fail to clean their hands of feces. It can be transmitted by direct contact to the mouth or through food and drink.
"The most important way to prevent the disease is good hand-washing. That's the message we want to get across," Stern said. "We don't want an hysterical response."
In Roanoke, 28 cases of dysentery have been identified in the past six weeks, health officials said. Two others recently have been traced to Botetourt County. Usually, Roanoke experiences one or two cases a year, officials said.
Of the 28 Roanoke cases, 13 have been in preschool children, six in school-age children and nine in adults. All but one of the nine persons hospitalized were children. The adult was a 77-year-old man.
Officials said 13 of the cases were discovered by taking stool cultures of household contacts of other victims.
One of the adults was a grocery store employee who now is not allowed to handle food, Stern said. The school-age children attend four elementary schools.
By alerting the public now, Stern said he hoped to avoid a massive outbreak of dysentery like the one that occurred in Richmond in 1981. "It got into the day-care centers and just took off," Stern said. "That's what we want to avoid."
About 650 cases were reported during the Richmond outbreak, he said. "There were lots of sick kids, lots of school absenteeism and lots of hospitalizations."
Symptoms usually begin within one to three days of infection. It is possible for persons to carry the shigella bacteria and not be sick.
Parents should not give their children Pepto-Bismol or otheranti-diarrheal medicines for this disease, Stern said, because they could prolong its duration.
by CNB