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SAN DIEGO – San Diego County Health Authorities have declared the end of an outbreak of hepatitis A that began two years ago, killing 20 people and nearly 600 patients.
Public health official Dr. Wilma Wooten said October 25 marks a hundred days since the last case, the threshold for no longer meeting the definition of a home, San Diego reported Tuesday. Union-Tribune.
San Diego has had only 15 new cases in 2018.
Local health authorities detected the infectious disease in February 2017. The investigators determined that the first probable case occurred during the week of November 22, 2016.
The epidemic has focused on the unhygienic living conditions of San Diego's homeless population.
City and county governments have promoted vaccination, washed the streets, installed portable toilets and hand-washing stations, and set up temporary shelters for 700 people at a time.
According to Union-Tribune, the cost of fighting the epidemic was estimated at more than $ 12 million.
According to Bob McElroy, Executive Director of Alpha Project, one of the organizations that operates new drop-in centers, the expense was enough to cope with the years of attention being focused on homelessness.
"In reality, if you have a place where people can be safe and have access to health care, you simply will not meet the type of sanitation problems you encounter with the tent cities installed in the cities. streets, "said McElroy.
Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Distinguished Professor of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, applauded San Diego's willingness to spend the necessary money.
"Hepatitis A is very contagious," Fielding said. "To master something like that, you need money, an informed bureaucracy, and a lot of coordination. It's clear that you have it in San Diego.
The need for resources and cleanliness does not end simply because the epidemic is over, he said.
Wooten, the public health officer, said the mobile "vaccination teams" of public health nurses accompanied by law enforcement officers that the county began sending in homeless camps are now a standard tool to use when needed.
One of the key lessons learned from the epidemic is that it often took months to convince homeless people at risk of accepting a vaccination that they considered a government conspiracy, Wooten said.
"But we knew it would take time for this population to trust us, and we just had to go back and commit ourselves to build that trust," she said.
Hepatitis A epidemics are continuing elsewhere in the country, including Michigan, where they date back to August 2016.
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Information from: The San Diego Union-Tribune, http://www.utsandiego.com
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
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