>>Local [Canadian] man had SARS [3000 to be retested]
Scott Dunn
Tuesday, June 17, 2003 - 08:00
Local news - A Grey-Bruce man who was removed from the list of suspected SARS cases actually had it in the early days of the first outbreak in Canada.
After-the-fact testing confirmed the young man, who is believed to have contracted the highly infectious severe acute respiratory syndrome in Singapore, had it when he was examined at Owen Sound hospital in March.
He was given antibiotics, quarantined at home and recovered, Dr. Hazel Lynn, the medical officer of health at the Grey Bruce Health Unit, said in an interview.
The man had originally been suspected of having SARS, but that was discounted after tests found he had Influenza B. There was no lab test for SARS at that time.
?Part of our criteria was if you don?t find another cause for the illness, then you call him SARS. Well, we found another cause. Influenza B can easily give you a high fever and feeling lousy,? although the man was ?probably sicker than I would expect a young, healthy person to be,? Lynn said.
The man lives in Grey-Bruce, but travels a lot, she added.
Now that a test for SARS is available, Health Canada?s laboratory in Winnipeg is going back and testing samples of blood and nasal swabs from 3,000 people who, like the local man, showed SARS symptoms but were taken off the list of probable SARS patients, Lynn said.
?Winnipeg is sort of working through them to see if they can find any that ended up in a wrong classification, which basically this was. We called him influenza B, which he was, but he was also SARS.?
Confirmation that the man had SARS was made Friday.
People the man came in contact with were quarantined ?and they stayed faithfully. As long as he was sick, they were very, very careful, which is probably why we didn?t get any spread (of the disease locally). But we didn?t do lab work on them because they weren?t sick.?
Lynn didn?t know how many other local people are now being re-evaluated for SARS, but she expects there are more and she won?t be surprised to find other SARS cases.
?I would suspect we will get at least one more . . . I know the case histories of some of these and some that really I thought they were going to be positive.?
Lynn said the value of knowing this so long after the fact is to let local health-care workers know they?re doing a good job.
?They?ve actually prevented the spread of the disease here by being careful with their infection control measures.?
Health Canada says there have been 34 deaths in Canada from SARS.
Grey Bruce Health Services president and CEO Pat Campbell recognized two GBHS staff members and Lynn at a board meeting last week, for their leadership efforts in the local battle against SARS.
Anne Tobey, an infection control nurse, and Dr. Brian Rudrick, a pathologist, are GBHS' leads in terms of the corporation's infection control portfolio.<<
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