Mass illness that sickened 27 still a mystery

School officials remained perplexed Tuesday over the mystery illness that struck 26 Cardinal Gibbons High School students and one staff member Monday and sent them to emergency rooms with symptoms ranging from seizures and fainting to nosebleeds and vomiting. The hospitalized students and staff from the private Catholic school had improved and were discharged by Monday evening and all blood work came back with negative results for drugs or contaminants, fire officials said.

“We just don’t know and life went on as usual today,” Mary Ross Agosta, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, said Tuesday evening. “It is the mystery that continues.”

About half of the student body was absent Tuesday, Agosta said, but she figured the Thanksgiving holiday largely contributed to that.

Students leaving campus after dismissal on Tuesday seemed indifferent about the wave of illness that struck the day before. “They said it was safe and that’s all that really matters,” said 15-year-old Shane Keleher, a freshman. Some of the students who fell ill were back in school Tuesday and some were not. Everything was “pretty much back to usual,” said Jonathan Kelgard, a 17-year-old junior. “We were just getting ready for the break with tests and quizzes,” he said.

Sickness struck after the student body attended a Monday morning Thanksgiving prayer in the gymnasium. It began with one student falling off the bleachers in a woozy state at the conclusion of the assembly. As students returned to their classrooms symptoms swept across campus. Some were nauseated and vomited or fainted. Others were dizzy, had shortness of breath and felt overheated. A few had seizures and some had nosebleeds. Ambulances were summoned and hazardous materials crews descended on the Fort Lauderdale campus.

After three hazmat sweeps of the gymnasium and cafeteria “yielded negative results and no presence of contaminants” and classrooms showed the same, the site was deemed “completely safe,” school officials said in a Facebook post on Tuesday evening.

Battalion Chief Stephen Gollan, a spokesman for Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue, said there was nothing new to report. “Unfortunately no updates on what possibly caused the incident,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “However, there have been no additional symptoms and everyone was released from the ER last night.”

Everyone who got sick was interviewed by rescuers and doctors, school officials said. “After thorough questioning, it was determined that there is no identifiable link in any of the illnesses reported,” the school’s Facebook post said.

“Though the official investigations conducted by [Fort Lauderdale police and fire rescue] were unable to identify a direct cause for the illness of our students, it is possible that the high stress of the situation, coupled with the excitement on campus, were contributing factors that may have led subsequent students to feel unwell, and as a precaution, these students were taken for medical examination.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health in Broward County said the agency is not involved in the case. MacKenzie MacLean, 14 and a freshman, said no one “really thought it was that big of a deal.”

“Everything’s back to normal. They said it’s safe. They didn’t really give us much of an official update,” she said. “It’s still a mystery … there was no fear, I don’t think, but it’s kind of like you want to know. It’s weird.”

MacKenzie said she found herself suspicious of the headache she felt when she got home from school Monday but figured it was because she hadn’t eaten lunch while the school was on a three-hour lockdown during the Haz-Mat sweeps.

“Then I ate something and everything was fine,” she said.

Next steps, according to the Facebook post from school officials, would include a cleaning and overhaul of the air-conditioning system.