Monkeypox farce puts public at risk
Health chiefs failed to get ‘virus’ house cleaned up for fortnight
BLUNDERING officials tackling the monkeypox disease outbreak in Britain have put the public in danger, The Mail on Sunday can reveal today.
A series of errors by ‘clueless’ public health officials resulted in a GP surgery and a house not being cleaned until last week – almost a fortnight after possible contamination with the virus, which kills up to one in ten of those infected.
The outbreak of the rare disease began early last month when two people fell ill in England. They had been in Nigeria, where the disease is rampant. One patient was taken to Blackpool Victoria Hospital in Lancashire.
A 49-year-old NHS female health worker at the hospital then fell ill on September 21 after contracting monkeypox from the patient’s bed linen – though Public Health England (PHE) had previously claimed there was minimal risk of infection.
Astonishingly, even though the woman told her GP on September 24 that she had been caring for a monkeypox patient, she was informed she only had ‘heat rash’.
She was correctly diagnosed with monkeypox the next day but it was not until nine days later that officials sent a team wearing masks and protective clothing to decontaminate her GP surgery, the Fleetwood Health & Wellbeing Centre.
The blunder means that patients and staff who passed through in the meantime have possibly been exposed to the virus.
The health worker, who lives with her partner in Fleetwood, is now in an isolation unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.
Her partner was taken to hospital in Liverpool after displaying possible symptoms before he was given the all-clear and sent home.
But it was only last Friday – ten days after his partner was diagnosed – that their property was decontaminated.
A friend of the couple said: ‘The authorities have made one mistake after another. Their incompetence has put the whole town at risk. They are clueless.’
Last night, infections expert Professor Hugh Pennington said health managers had underestimated the risk, adding: ‘When you’ve got two confirmed cases, you would have thought they’d have pulled all the stops out to decontaminate.’
Dr Nick Phin, of PHE’s National Infections Service told the MoS: ‘The risk of transmission of monkeypox is very low, but we are unable to exclude the possibility of the virus being present in a patient’s home, if they were at home when they were unwell.’
He added: ‘As a precaution, teams will be cleaning the homes of patients with confirmed monkeypox. During our investigation we have contacted and risk-assessed all those known to have potentially been in contact with the cases in order to determine what follow-up would be appropriate.’