Anxiety over mystery illness spreads: Southern Nevada officials are on alert

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, April 2, 2003 | 11:04 a.m.

As the number of reported cases worldwide of a flu-like illness jumped 11 percent Tuesday from the day before, local officials took their cues from national health authorities and kept a watchful eye for possible cases of the illness in the Las Vegas Valley.

"Everybody's on the alert," said Rose Bell, program manager for the epidemiology department of the Clark County Health District.

But so far, though suspected cases of the disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have appeared in California, Utah and Texas, none has been reported in Las Vegas, she said.

The district has been sending out information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to physicians in Las Vegas Valley hospitals and has been working with airlines to make the same information available to passengers who may have traveled to or from Asia, where the disease has spread since November.

The number of direct flights from the region to Las Vegas will drop this month. Japan Airlines, which normally has one flight from Tokyo on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, said it would be suspending flights on April 13, 20 and 22 due to a drop in demand linked to the economic downturn and the war in Iraq, Sachiko Baye, reservation agent for the airline, said.

Singapore Airlines, the only other airline with direct flights from Asia, recently announced it would suspend flights as of next Monday for similar reasons.

Bell said that if a suspected case of SARS occurred at McCarran International Airport, the person would be taken to a holding area and then transported to an isolation room in one of 10 local hospitals. The district has nurses on duty at the airport, as well as paramedics on staff, she said.

Bell also said that protecting health-care workers is important, since several of the outbreaks have been linked to physicians who have caught the disease and transmitted it to family members.

Medical personnel at the University Medical Center could not be reached for comment. Cheryl Smith, a spokeswoman for Sunrise Hospital, said that the hospital is following the same procedures that are used for any infectious disease and is updated by the health district and the CDC.

The CDC information being distributed includes the disease's symptoms, which are fevers above 100.4 degrees, body aches, chills and a dry cough after two to seven days.

The centers advise people with these symptoms who have traveled to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore or Hanoi, or who have had contact with someone who has traveled to these areas, to notify authorities immediately.

The CDC has recommended postponing all non-essential trips to those places.

At McCarran Tuesday, spokeswoman Debbie Millett said that customs officials are also handing out cards with the CDC's information.

"The airport itself doesn't have an active role in this," she said. "We're not health professionals, but air travel professionals."

Though no test exists for the disease, the CDC, the World Health Organization and other laboratories are working on two tests that may be able to detect antibodies to the virus suspected of causing the disease.

Bell said the health district had received no information on the tests.

Bell also said that the total number of suspected cases in the United States -- 70 as of Tuesday -- is very low and should not yet be a cause for alarm.

A total of 1,804 cases had been reported worldwide Tuesday, according to the WHO, up from 1,622 the day before.

As for whether grouping large numbers of people who have come from different parts of the world in hotels on the Strip could be a recipe for spreading the disease if a tourist happened to be sick, she said that research to date would indicate that the risk is low.

"Nobody has indicated that this has been spread through air conditioning, and how it was spread through an apartment complex in Hong Kong is unclear," she said.

"My hope is that it is not transmitted that easily."