THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 25, 1994 TAG: 9407250052
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: STATE FARM LENGTH: Long : 126 lines
It doesn't look like much. Dark, wet dirt under a waterlogged plastic tarp held down by bricks and orange traffic cones. But the stuff under the tarp in front of the Powhatan Correctional Center's medical building has caused a lot of trouble.
It contains a potentially fatal component: decayed bird drop-pings.
Those bird droppings, infectious-disease specialists say, are almost certainly responsible for Virginia's worst epidemic of acute histoplasmosis, a sometimes fatal fungal infection characterized by high fever, headache, dizziness, chest pains and pneumatic lung patches.
Since late June, 32 Powhatan inmates and workers have been hospitalized with the disease. Health care workers say one inmate's fever got so high, he had to be rushed to a hospital in a body bag packed with ice. Another went into seizures. Two more victims ended up on respirators. In the interim, 300 employees and residents of Powhatan have had their blood tested to determine any exposure.
The fungus, which is unleashed into the air when decayed bird or bat droppings are disturbed, is inhaled into the lungs and can then spread to the liver, spleen, bone marrow, skin or the lining around the brain or heart. The disease was initially noticed among cave explorers, miners and tunnel workers tombs.
The Powhatan epidemic started, staff and inmates say, when wardens of the state's prisons began to worry that newly appointed corrections boss Ron Angelone might drop by unannounced.
At Powhatan, workers and inmates were dispatched to paint and remodel an empty cluster of isolation cells in the basement of a place called M-Building, which houses maximum security prisoners and which, for many years, was inexplicably besieged by sparrows and small blackbirds.
The birds have been gone since 1991 - discouraged by fishing wire strung up around the building's courtyard, Powhatan Warden Don Guillory said - but their accumulated droppings remained. On June 17, a Friday, two unsuspecting maintenance workers plunged their shovels into a pile of dirt contaminated by the droppings and shoveled the dirt onto the back of a flatbed trailer. Within an hour, one of them, a thin, bearded plumber and steamfitter named Eddy Harlon, had to be helped to the medical building.
By Tuesday, June 22, Harlon was on a respirator in the intensive-care unit of Chippenham Medical Center in Midlothian, and three M-Building residents had come down with high fevers.
By Wednesday, health care workers say, eight more inmates were sick. Initially diagnosed with heat prostration, they were sent to the emergency room at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, where they were examined and returned to the prison.
But when the number of sick inmates went up to 21 the next day, MCV infectious-disease specialist Sara Monroe said, the hospital staff realized they couldn't all have heat stroke.
``You can imagine what it's like to be a doctor and to have all these people coming in and to have to decide who belongs in the hospital,'' Monroe said.
``We were getting very crowded. We had to put inmates on the regular medical wards with the other patients. And for each (inmate), there were two guards. The halls were filled with guards.''
Monroe worried the patients had hantavirus - an infection spread by mouse droppings that killed dozens of people in the Southwest last year. She also thought about Legionnaires' disease. The mystery was solved when a lung biopsy done on Harlon came out positive for histoplasmosis.
Harlon, 35, was not expected to live. He spent 17 days in the hospital, lost 13 pounds and accumulated a bill of $57,000. Weak and exhausted from his ordeal, he now spends his days at home in Crewe, napping and caring for his 2-year-old daughter, Ashley. His doctor has told him he won't be able to return to work until at least October.
``It's just been a disaster,'' he said. ``I can't sleep, I can't mow my yard, I can't tote my daughter around, I can't do nothing. I can't even go fishing. I'm just tired and sore.''
The man who helped Harlon shovel the dirt onto the truck is also too sick to work. So is a third worker who helped unload the dirt and spread it in the parking lot across from the medical building. Three more have returned to their jobs.
Powhatan has had problems with histoplasmosis before. Last fall, state Secretary of Public Safety Jerry Kilgore said, MCV doctors warned prison officials that a number of HIV-infected inmates had come down with the histoplasmosis virus.
``An area between the medical unit and M-Building that might be causing the exposure was identified,'' Kilgore wrote in a news release. ``A cleanup plan was developed and completed by maintenance staff.''
But Mary Schwanger, a spokesman for the Virginia Alliance of State Employees/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union with a membership of roughly 2,000 correctional officers, doesn't believe there was ever a cleanup.
``We don't have any knowledge of that, and it's our belief that it didn't happen,'' she said. ``If it did happen, then the employees who did the cleaning had no idea what they were dealing with. We have not talked to any front-line staff that knew anything about the histoplasmosis last year.''
The union wrote to Gov. George F. Allen in June, asking him to close the ``contaminated areas'' of the prison, but got no response, Schwanger said. Letters to the commissioner of the Department of Labor and Industry and the acting commissioner of the Department of Health were acknowledged, but not answered, she said.
Eventually, Guillory said, the debris in the medical building parking lot will be paved with asphalt or concrete. The recreation area where it initially accumulated has been treated with bleach, which kills the fungus. At some point, Guillory said, it too will be paved.
From Cell 12 in M-Building, inmate Dennis Stockton can see out into the recreation area.
``They've not let anyone in this building go out there since late June,'' he said.
``They came out last week and sprayed it with something. It must've been something pretty strong because I see two dead birds out there right now and they're all swoll up.'' MEMO: The staff of the Virginian-Pilot Library contributed to this story.
ILLUSTRATION: A VICTIM
SCOTT BROWN/AP
Maintenance worker Eddy Harlon, shown with daughter Ashley, got sick
from a potentially fatal fungus while cleaning an unused area at the
Powhatan Correctional Center. He was in a hospital for 17 days.
SCOTT BROWN/AP
A tarp covers decayed bird droppings at the Powhatan Correctional
Center. The droppings are the likely source of a disease that struck
32 workers and inmates at the prison.
KEYWORDS: HISTOPLASMOSIS VIRGINIA STATE PRISON by CNB