American health officials are pressing for emergency action to control an outbreak of respiratory illness that has killed 36 people in Ohio and Kentucky.
American health officials are pressing for emergency action to control an outbreak of respiratory illness that has killed 36 people in Ohio and Kentucky.
Cleveland doctors said they have asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to declare a national emergency, The Associated Press reported. President Donald Trump has been briefed on the situation.
But there are conflicting reports on how long the virus may have been present, and to what extent it could pose a threat in other parts of the country.
The Ohio Department of Health told the AP on Sunday that the virus wasn’t immediately confined to the places where it has been most recently identified and that it has spread as far as the Brooklyn area of New York. Cleveland is where infections have occurred.
Then, on Monday, the director of the Atlanta-based CDC, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, said the hospital where the outbreak originated had reported that the outbreak was “more extensive and less circumscribed” than previously reported. The CDC said that some of the Ohio fatalities had occurred in Kentucky.
“We’re very concerned about this,” Dr. Fitzgerald said during a call with reporters on Monday. “The longer it’s out there, the more dangerous it is. We don’t have very good control strategies in place to stop it at this point.”
Dr. Fitzgerald did not say what those strategies could be.
“We’re hoping we get control of this and we’re going to try and try to take a ‘warrior approach’ to it,” she said.
The coroner’s office in Ohio has not yet identified the cause of death for the dozen deaths, according to the AP, and investigators are awaiting samples from the state.