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ST. PETERSBURG, Florida – Since last fall, we have been reporting on restaurants and food service employees in the Bay Area who have been tested for Hepatitis A.
One of the first ones we heard about was Hamburger Mary's from Ybor City and since then local health officials have identified many more cases.
But now, 10Investigates has discovered a whole new set of hepatitis A investigations that the Ministry of Health has not reported.
These are 19 additional cases discovered in state public registries and indicating an increasing number of confirmed cases of hepatitis A in restaurants in the Bay Area.
Most of them are employees whose screening test is positive, but at least one of them is a client who has contracted Hepatitis A and who thinks he can have it. -be caught in a Treasure Island restaurant.
The file does not indicate if this has already been confirmed.
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So why does the Ministry of Health publish public notices for some of these restaurants and not for all?
In a statement from the County of Pinellas Health Department, the agency says they only issue a notification when certain criteria are met, including symptoms, tasks, who was exposed and how much, as well as other factors.
"We do not take these notifications lightly and only do so when it is necessary for public health," said Maggie Hall, spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County.
To give you an idea of how often we see hepatitis A restaurants in the Bay area last summer, we had an average of one reported case per month in restaurants.
By the second half of the year, this number had risen to three reported cases per month.
In the first four months of 2019, we almost exceeded the total number of cases registered last year.
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The good news: Most of these restaurants that had a case of hepatitis A told 10News that they had gone ahead and had followed the advice of the health department and had vaccinated all their employees. Once that happens, you've also eliminated the risk
This means that many of the listed restaurants are perhaps among the safest in the city.
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