Salmonella outbreaks linked to hospitals; doctors warned

The bug has hit institutions in at least eight Northeast states, and public health officials are racing to determine the source.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Sept. 4, 2006.

Public health officials are calling on physicians to consider the possibility of Salmonella when faced with a patient who has diarrhea and may have had recent contact with the medical system -- either as a patient, hospital visitor or health care worker, particularly in New Hampshire and elsewhere in the Northeast.

"Think about Salmonella, and test the patient," said Jose Montero, MD, state epidemiologist and chief of communicable disease control with the New Hampshire Dept. of Health and Human Services.

This advice is being given because public health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and in New Hampshire are in the process of tracking a multistate outbreak of Salmonella oranienburg. The initial cases were detected in that Northeast state, and, at press time, officials had found 34 people throughout the region who all had contact with health care facilities and became ill. Those investigating the outbreak say it could be a national problem related to food consumed at these facilities and have initiated a case-control study to determine the cause.

"We have found eight states with cases that match this pattern, but it may grow," said Elizabeth Daly, MPH, a foodborne disease epidemiologist with the New Hampshire DHHS who is leading the investigation. "We're trying to find something that's common to all of them."

Although the source of this outbreak was unknown at press time, many experts suspect -- because it is geographically widespread -- that it may not be the result of hygiene problems at these institutions. Instead, since so many hospitals have been impacted by the same organism, it is almost certain that the contamination occurred somewhere else and then was delivered to the facilities.