While a 22-year-old Morgan Hill man tested positive for a
probable case of swine flu, fears have wound down in Gilroy as
Rucker Elementary School reopened Monday morning.
Gilroy
While a 22-year-old Morgan Hill man tested positive for a probable case of swine flu, fears have wound down in Gilroy as Rucker Elementary School reopened Monday morning.
As of Monday morning, the 22-year-old was the only South County resident to have a probable case and was one of 10 cases in Santa Clara County, according to Teresa Chagoya, spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Public Health Department. The man was not hospitalized and is recovering at home, Chagoya said.
Meanwhile, it was “business as usual” at Rucker Elementary School said Principal Barbara Keesaw. The district closed the rural school in north Gilroy Thursday afternoon at the county health department’s behest after 10 students were sent home with severe flu symptoms. Seven of the children were students in one fourth grade class. However, three of the 10 students who were tested returned negative test results and most of the other students recovered over the weekend, said Superintendent Deborah Flores. Because of these negative results, the school reopened its doors Monday morning, Keesaw said.
“It’s a major relief the first few were negative because one of the children had all the symptoms, and the other two were very ill,” Flores said, adding that fall and winter flu outbreaks commonly remove 10 children at a time from the school of about 640 students. “This looks like a different influenza, and we were being very cautious Thursday when we decided to close the school.”
Shutting down a school for a longer period of time requires the presence of at least one probable case.
State standardized tests, which were interrupted by Rucker’s closure Friday, are scheduled to resume today and will not be affected by the brief delay, Keesaw said.
“We have a few more absent today than usual,” she said Monday afternoon. “But we haven’t had parents calling to keep their kids out for no good reason. We asked parents to please be diligent about keeping their kids home if they are sick, but if they’re well, please send them to school.”
But for Morgan Hill’s outstanding case, county nurses are conducting a “contact investigation,” in which they will interview those who were in close contact with the man, such as workers, friends and roommates, Chagoya said. The health department has conducted such investigations in all 10 of the probable county cases.
Federal health officials are concerned because swine flu – also known as H1N1 – is a new virus for which people have little or no immunity and no vaccine. The flu has been confirmed in 21 countries in at least 1,085 cases, including more than 286 people in the United States, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization. One U.S. death, a toddler in Texas, has been linked to swine flu. In Mexico, the hardest hit region so far, 25 people have been confirmed to have died of the virus, according to the WHO web site.
Until the California Department of Public Health can conduct further tests on suspicious samples, the county is treating all probable cases as confirmed.
“Any probables are very likely to come back confirmed,” said Chagoya, though so far none of the more than 100 local samples of probable swine flu cases have been officially confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga.
On Wednesday, a teen at the William F. James Boys Ranch – a juvenile detention center east of Morgan Hill – became “very sick” and was quarantined at the Juvenile Hall in San Jose, Probation Department spokeswoman Delores Nnam said. By Friday the patient’s samples had tested negative for swine flu.
The county analyzes swabs and cultures of “possible cases” of the virus taken at local health clinics. If the results come back positive for type A flu virus, the case is labeled “probable” for H1N1 and forwarded to state labs, which just received the necessary testing equipment over the weekend.
Statewide, the number of confirmed cases jumped over the weekend, from 24 to 30, the CDC reported via its Web site.
Monday morning, the state Department of Corrections reported the first probable swine flu case within the prison system. An inmate at Centinela State Prison in Imperial County was diagnosed with symptoms of the flu.
As a result, visitation at all California state prisons has been eliminated until the threat passes, according to Dr. Steven Ritter, California Prison Health Care Services Acting Chief Physician Executive. All other “nonessential activities” at state correction facilities, including volunteer activities and special events, have also been canceled.
As the virus has continued to spread globally, the WHO last week raised the pandemic alert from 4 to 5, indicating an “imminent threat” of a global outbreak.
Staff writers Natalie Everett, Sara Suddes and Chris Bone contributed to this story.
