Officials: Hepatitis A outbreak is contained
Maricopa County public health officials say a hepatitis A outbreak linked to 17 deaths in San Diego has been contained in Arizona, with only 15 known cases and no deaths.
While California struggles with an outbreak that prompted San Diego County to declare a public health emergency, Arizona officials believe the local outbreak was mainly confined to homeless people in Maricopa County. Officials have detected no new Arizona cases since the end of May.
The San Diego outbreak, mainly affecting homeless people and drug users, has killed 17, hospitalized 337 and infected 481 people. Cases also emerged in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz counties.
Public health officials say the Maricopa County outbreak was tied to one person who traveled from San Diego to Maricopa County earlier this year. Follow-up testing confirmed the viral strain matched the San Diego cases and had spread mainly among people who used services from a homeless campus from mid-February through the end of May.
Public health officials continued to monitor the outbreak, but have detected no new cases linked to the California outbreak, according to Sally Ann Iverson, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemic intelligence services officer assigned to Maricopa County and Arizona. Neither the Maricopa County Department of Public Health nor the Arizona Department of Health Services broadly notified the public about the outbreak.
Iverson said public health officials shared information about the outbreak with employees and users of the unidentified homeless facility.
Health officials distributed soap and hand sanitizer and offered shelter employees and homeless clients the hepatitis A vaccine. The vaccine was given to 221 of 1,000 clients and 105 of 250 campus staff, according to research presented at an Infectious Diseases Society of America conference in San Diego this week.
Officials believe the highly contagious, liver-attacking virus, which is spread through contact with an infected person’s feces, circulated due to crowding and poor hygiene among the homeless population in Maricopa County.
Hepatitis A also can be spread through contaminated food, but researchers found no evidence that either eating or sleeping at the homeless shelter was connected to the outbreak.
Health officials believe they may have slowed the spread of hepatitis A through vaccinations and stressing better hygiene.
“This was in the homeless community and that is where we targeted our intervention,” said Iverson. She added that some Arizona cases were tied to drug users.