Health Officials Insist IS 211 Students Are Safe
By Karla Schuster.Karla.Schuster@newsday.Com; Maria Alvarez and Newsday Staff Writer Sophia Chang Contributed To This Story., Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Oct. 27–Faced with panicked parents and amid calls for better medical screening, city health officials Friday insisted the classmates of a Brooklyn boy who died after catching the so-called “superbug” are not at risk, but admitted they may never know how the child was exposed to the infection.
Children at IS 211 in Canarsie, where the boy was a seventh-grader, “are at no higher risk of getting a staph infection than children at any other school in New York City,” City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden said at a news conference Friday. “A death like this,” he said, “is very rare.”
At one point, after a Department of Education official described how custodians sanitized the middle school, Frieden jumped in and pronounced the cleaning unnecessary, because the antibiotic-resistant infection is generally spread through skin-to-skin contact “with someone who has a leaking wound.”
“Please remember that cleaning of the environment is very unlikely to make any difference in the spread of infection,” Frieden said. “It’s something that’s done to make people feel better.”
The boy, identified by classmates and their parents as Omar Rivera, 12, died after contracting methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA. His parents could not be reached for comment Friday.
Some classmates and friends recall seeing Omar scratching telltale boils on his legs and back, but Frieden declined to reveal any details about Omar’s treatment. It was not clear Friday whether the boy had been diagnosed with MRSA before he died.
Steven Davis, 14, a neighbor of Omar’s at the BayView Houses in Canarsie, said his friend had complained of feeling sick for weeks.
“He was telling all his friends he was not feeling well, he had sores on his body and then the next thing we heard he was in the hospital and he died,” Steven said Friday.
City officials would only say that Omar had not been in school since Oct. 9, and was under medical care prior to his death. The school notified the Health Department of the boy’s death on Oct. 19, and lab tests conducted three days later, October 22, showed he had MRSA, Frieden said. The city notified the boy’s parents on Tuesday but did not send a letter to other parents in the school until Thursday.
The city currently does not require labs to report MRSA infections, although a mandated reporting proposal is pending before the Board of Health. A state lawmaker Friday also proposed legislation that would require all hospitals to screen high-risk patients for the infection before they are admitted.
“It’s a no-brainer,” said state Sen. Martin Golden(D-Brooklyn), who proposed the law. “I don’t want to see another parent go through this.”
More than 90,000 people get MRSA each year in the United States, and an estimated 18,000 die from it, according to a federal study.
The Health Department previously said that the infection is “a probable cause” of the boy’s death, but it will be weeks before the medical examiner’s office will issue a conclusive finding.
Molecular tests may eliminate some possibilities, but “we will never know exactly where he got the infection,” Frieden said.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said attendance at IS 211 Friday was down slightly. The building was sanitized with a bleach solution this week, but has remained open. He said principals and parent coordinators citywide were told to remind parents and students about frequent hand-washing, but that no additional cleaning was planned for other city schools.
“We have lots of different programs in schools that are intended to keep kids safe,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show Friday. “But kids will be kids and it’s hard to get ‘em to eat healthy and to get them to wash their hands as much as they can.”
Betsy McCaughey, chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths or RID, said she was dismissed by a Department of Education school health official last spring when she called to discuss launching new initiatives in city schools to prevent the spread of MRSA. Klein declined to comment, saying he was not aware of the conversation.
“I had a whole agenda, but they felt it wasn’t an urgent problem in New York at that time,” McCaughey said. “It is unfortunate that government often doesn’t act until a tragedy happens.”
Maria Alvarez and Newsday staff writer Sophia Chang contributed to this story.
—–
To see more of Newsday, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsday.com
Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.