Maybe! "WHO" really Knows? If he is still alive we should ask him!
Coverup? Is SARS Already
Rampant In California?
5-11-3
Dear Editor:
I am a health care worker working in a North Bay Area hospital. Since as early as March, on my documented patient rosters, we have been seeing a continual pattern of strange "atypical" pneumonia patients.
The pattern is as follows:
Sudden shortness of breath, fever documented in charts as 100.4 to 102.2, ARDS, pleural effusions, cardiac effusions, diarrhea for 3 days to 2 weeks, pneumonia all with a grainy or nodule pattern on X rays, respiratory failure leading more and more to death after ventilator support. At first the patients presented with a viral pneumonia presentation, then they went to a bacterial pneumonia presentation, then they went into kidney and liver failures, then unknown septicemia patterns, and mortality increasing. We started out with compromised patients with underlying disease, especially COPD or heart problems, cancer history or chronic fatigue syndrome history or HIV as early fatalities in March. There is a strong pattern of repeat pneumonia patients worsening and readmitted from hospitalizations in January.
Then younger and younger patients with less compromise started getting the same patterns. We had a patient in the teens and one in their in 20's. Other health care workers, working in a children's ICU close by, report the same patterns and that they have lost many children to this pattern. How many deaths? We have lost up to 20 people on one shift in one month who have died with this pattern. As staff members we don't know how many total have died or who is keeping track of our mortality rates. The state licensing agencies have been notified as well as public health by concerned staff members filing complaints that their patient mortality rate is increasing with the same patterns. Infection control and isolation procedures have been incredibly lax as well as proper equipment in working with isolation patients, such as proper N95 masks not available or shoe covers for many isolation R/O SARS. Many of the patients who died were not even in contact isolations.
Our staff has reported increasing, unexplained fatigue and diarrhea after working with these "atypical" pneumonia patients. Stewards attempting to get staff screened for symptoms or nasal swabs for viral infection have been ignored and disciplined attempted for questioning infection control policy or alerting staff to new infectious control SARS-LIKE patterns. We as several staff believe their is a cover up on an infectious disease with SARS-LIKE symptoms and that the staff members are being put at risk without proper inservice or protections to themselves. We don't know if this is ignorance, dysfunctional health care system problems, worries about corporate liability, or if we being used as experiments to see how this pattern spreads. None of us have agreed to be experiments or are being compensated as such. The hospital where this pattern has been a problem is in the Napa, Solono County, California. I am reporting this pattern in the interest of public safety without using or disclosing names of patients or staff or the specific hospital involved. We. as staff, are gagged from public disclosures of problems by corporate compliance papers that we have signed in the last six weeks that threaten a $10,000 fine, termination, or 6 months in jail for disclosing health care information. The policy is so tight that we can not even give a safe report to each other under their guidelines if we followed them strictly.
We do not believe, as staff , that this policy was designed or is functional for patient care, but was designed to protect the physicians and the hospital from mismanagement or liability issues without regard to public safety. Our hospital has continually refused to report it's suspect SARS patients to public health or accurately disclose it's numbers of SARS case under investigation, and do so only when forced to do so, by staff reporting to public health the numbers are not matching what they are seeing and working with. Many of our health we are concerned that a potential infectious disease contagious spread to the prison facilities would result in a horror of deaths to the prisoners. The California prison conditions are severely over crowded and have sanitation problems and many of the prisoners are already compromised with lowered immune systems now.
Respiratory Therapist
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