Attention: One common way that disease spreads is the "Finger Feces Food Fly" route of transmission.
from Wikipedia:
Wikipedia lists diseases that spread this way:
Bacteria[edit]
- Shigella (shigellosis / bacillary dysentery)[3]
Viruses[edit]
- Rotavirus[6] – Most of these pathogens cause gastroenteritis.
Protozoans[edit]
- Toxoplasma gondii[7] (toxoplasmosis)
Helminths[edit]
- Ascariasis and other soil transmitted helminthiasis
- Shigella (shigellosis / bacillary dysentery)[3]
- Rotavirus[6] – Most of these pathogens cause gastroenteritis.
- Toxoplasma gondii[7] (toxoplasmosis)
- Ascariasis and other soil transmitted helminthiasis
second headline: Death toll from San Diego Hepatitis epidemic reaches 17.with no signs of slowing.
guess where it came from?
In this case, genetic analysis has shown that the strains in this outbreak are unrelated to another ongoing outbreak in Southeastern Michigan and to previous multistate outbreaks connected to frozen strawberries and pomegranate seeds. But the same analysis has also proven that there is a connection to a much smaller recent outbreak in Santa Cruz County, which has 69 confirmed cases mostly among homeless residents and illicit drug users, much like in San Diego.
the second story has a photo showing them cleaning off the sidewalks with bleach water.
they are also giving out hepatitis A vaccine and handing out hand cleaner and towels and plastic bags to discard the excrement safely.
well, duh.
And both articles note that they are going to teach the public the ways to prevent the virus, such as handwashing, and getting Hepatitis A vaccine.
yup. that will protect yuppies, but not the hallucinating or high homeless person who has no access to running water or toilets.
The epidemic seems to be spreading from public defecation by street people. One article on the right wing site Breitbart said part of the spread was because plastic bags were banned, so street people could no longer bag their excrement. (/sarcasm).
but I am linking to them because they pulled their story from the local paper.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, something as simple as a ready supply of littered plastic bags may have slowed the spread of the outbreak.
“The reason the outbreak has spread so rapidly is because homeless are living in more concentrated areas,” said Dr. Jeffrey Norris, the St. Vincent De Paul medical director who has been managing the charity’s response to the public health threat. “They often have to defecate in their tent, or next to their tent, and that exposes their neighbors on the street. Hygiene becomes incredibly difficulty.”By “taking away a manageable alternative to defecating outside a bathroom,” the article suggests county health workers have been forced to play catch up and spend more money “handing out thousands of ‘hygiene kits’ that include plastic bags.”
Here is another article from Kaiser news, that discusses the response, or lack thereof:
Health officials in California are struggling to contain fierce outbreaks of hepatitis A among homeless people and drug abusers in three counties, including San Diego, where at least 17 people have died.
Hundreds more have become ill and been hospitalized, mostly in the San Diego area, often not far from tourist destinations. The disease also has cropped up farther north in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz counties. Poor access to restrooms and sinks in homeless encampments is largely to blame.
Public health officials say the crisis has caught them off guard because it’s rare for the disease to spread so rampantly when it isn’t tied to a common source, such as a tainted food product. Meanwhile, as cases mount with no end in sight, critics fault authorities’ response as lethargic.why the sluggish response? They are poor, and homeless. Many homeless are mentally ill and/or drug abusers, and some are aggressive if you bother them.
“We go into the canyons, we go everywhere,” said Amy Gonyeau, chief operating officer for the Alpha Project, a nonprofit that provides homeless services. “We go out every day. We have our own vehicles and vans … we educate people on what’s going on.”
On a recent morning, an Alpha Project team delivered hygiene kits — soap, hand sanitizer and other toiletries packaged in clear plastic bags — to a crowded encampment in downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood. Tents and shopping carts line the sidewalks in this section of downtown that’s largely hidden from the city’s tourists.
“It looks like a war zone,” said Larissa Wimberly, an outreach supervisor for Alpha Project. “There’s people out here with HIV, people out here with cancer, there’s people out here with heart issues. There are people who are just old and feeble and they’re not eating right. It’s really sad.”
As Wimberly rides shotgun in a large, white Alpha Project van driven by her colleague Cain Mariscal, she points to the myriad tents and shopping carts. Behind and between them, she says, many residents relieve themselves.
“It’s everywhere,” she says of excrement. “It’s just really bad right now.”
But the real reason: They are invisible.
all of this is basic public health. Their public health spokes person laments
critics say health officials have been too slow to act, especially to install toilets and sinks.
“This whole crisis is man-made,” Michael McConnell, a La Jolla, Calif., coin dealer and advocate for homeless residents, told the San Diego Union Tribune in a story published Monday. “The response is certainly much too late, based on when they knew they had a serious problem. Even today, all they’ve done is the most easy stuff. They have taken zero bold action.”
Some told the newspaper that the reaction is symptomatic of a lackluster response to the problems of poor and homeless people in their midst.
“This is an unprecedented outbreak,” said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer and director of Public Health Services for the San Diego County Health & Human Services Agency. “This is new territory.”
sheesh: Unprecedented? Lady, where have you been.
Any doc who has worked in Zimbabwe or in the Philippines or even on the Native American reservations is aware of how these diseases spread.
give a call to the local National Guard or Reserve units and ask for a specialist on field hygiene and water supply.
I know there are a lot of military vets in the San Diego area, so it's not like no one knows this stuff.
Public toilets, or even open pit latrines with disinfection in wooded areas could be dug quickly, and regular toilets with running water could be supplied in a few weeks.
the military knows that disease causes more casualties than being shot at. So they hold regular courses on this for soldiers. LINK more HERE.
you mean, the head of public health hasn't bothered to do basic stuff that any army unit is taught to do (and could probably set up in homeless areas within a few weeks)?
It's basic public health: Or basic sanitation.
the local SDFreePress article (sept 2017) (a progressive paper) is quite blunt about it, and outlines the tepid response to the homeless in that city over the last year.
This explains the background to the epidemic: press conferences and plans being drawn up slowly but little action.
Sheesh.
I should note: In rural Africa, one problem was that people relieved themselves in wooded areas: "go to the woods" was a euphemism for "go to the toilet".
But they would not use latrines because they smelled and were full of flies.
We started working with the schools on building latrines with fly traps and with instructions how to put in disinfection so that the smell would be minimal.
Here, men do their thing against walls, and the park downtown has public toilets with running water, but I don't know if anyone uses them.
We have our own septic tank (actually two: one for the house and one for the business compound). But most of the drainage just goes into the open air ditches that serve us for sewers.
Now that the open ditches are being made larger and are covered, it makes me wonder what will happen. I know our local jail drains into a crack in the ditch cover, but overflows badly....But we are rural Philippines, not a first world major city.
mark your calenders: International Toilet day is November 19.
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