Local swine flu worriers flood emergency rooms
BY JAMES BURGER, Californian staff writer jburger@bakersfield.com
News and rumors about the international spread of swine flu are sending fearful Kern County residents to hospitals in droves.
Some have a cold. Others a runny nose. Some aren’t ill at all.
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Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Gregory Adams, who worries he has contracted swine flu, waits in the busy Bakersfield Memorial Hospital Emergency Room for a doctor to see him.
“Yesterday we had a record census in our ER,” Jarrod McNaughton, spokesman for San Joaquin Hospital, said Thursday. “One hundred and eighty-eight people came through and the majority of those were worried that they had swine flu.”
“We had a record-breaking census in our emergency room yesterday,” said Terri Church, vice president of nursing at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. “We had whole families coming in with allergy symptoms.”
Memorial saw 207 people Wednesday, far above the hospital’s former record day of 180.
Emergency room doctors at San Joaquin and Memorial didn’t test a single patient for swine flu that day because none of the worried individuals had symptoms of the disease, McNaughton and Church said.
Dr. Eugene Kercher, chief medical officer at Kern Medical Center, said the county hospital’s emergency room was in the same situation.
“The waiting room has been packed for three days,” he said. “They're bringing whole families in. None of them have symptoms. But they're scared to death of the swine flu.”
He said patients must have a high fever, cough and history that shows they could have been exposed to swine flu before KMC doctors will perform a test and mail it off.
Results come back in three days.
Risk factors for the disease are travel to Mexico over the last 30 days, contact with a lab-confirmed swine flu case or contact with pigs, Kercher said.
“We definitely want to see people and treat people if they have the presenting symptoms of swine flu,” McNaughton said. “If they do not, it really presents a huge drain on our resources.”
Gregory Adams of Bakersfield was in the Memorial emergency room Thursday saying he’d had a rough morning fighting a fever and nausea.
He clutched a pink plastic hospital tray in his lap as he lay on a gurney. He wore a surgical mask over his face.
“Everyone should be wearing one,” he said.
He came to the hospital by ambulance, he said, “to define whether this was the swine flu or the regular flu.”
Steve Schilling of Clinica Sierra Vista said one patient who came into a clinic in Arvin Wednesday has been tested, and the blood work sent off to the California Department of Public Health.
But he said the majority of people coming into the clinics he runs exhibit minor illnesses.
“This is more a panic pandemic than an epidemic,” Schilling said. “We’re seeing a lot of folks coming in concerned and wanting some reassurance.”
The California Department of Public Health reported 16 confirmed cases and 23 probable cases in California late Thursday morning.
All were mild; none was in Kern County.
If you’ve just got the sniffles, a cough, sore throat or a runny nose, officials with the Kern County Department of Public Health suggest you stay home, get some rest, drink lots of liquids and avoid any contact that could spread your illness.
But, local health care officials said, they want people exhibiting flu symptoms to call or come in to a clinic, doctor or emergency room.
“If you’re home and you’re vomiting and you have a fever and you’ve been to Mexico, call us,” Schilling said.
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