The Provincetown Independent: Hepatitis A Case at Restaurant Provokes Wide Alert
Article by Paul Benson, Provincetown Independent
PROVINCETOWN — On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the traditional kickoff of summer on Cape Cod, an alert went out from the Dept. of Public Health to news media across the state: a food-service worker at the Red Inn in Provincetown had contracted the hepatitis A virus, and people who dined at the restaurant between April 30 and May 15 could have been exposed.
“Hepatitis A is spread as a result of fecal contamination (fecal-oral route) and may be spread from person to person through close contact or through food handling,” the alert said. “The virus can be spread by contaminated food and beverages.”
This type of “patron alert” is designed to reach people at risk as quickly as possible, said Barnstable County epidemiologist Lea Hamner.
“The patron notification is an important tool for public health when we can’t identify all the folks who were exposed with whom we need to communicate,” she said. Time was a factor, Hamner said, because people who could have been exposed could protect themselves by getting the hepatitis A vaccine or beginning a course of immune globulin medication if they acted within two weeks of their potential exposure.
“When we got the information the person was a food handler and figured out their infectious period, we were pretty close to the end of the period where a post-exposure prophylaxis vaccine could do some good,” Hamner said. “We needed to give people as many days as possible to talk to their doctor and find a vaccine if they needed a vaccine.”
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