SPRINGDALE : Officials: Leprosy story false
Posted on Saturday, February 9, 2008
No outbreaks of leprosy or tuberculosis exist in Springdale or elsewhere in Northwest Arkansas, state health officials said Friday in an attempt to allay fear following a TV station’s report Thursday night.
While there are nine reported cases of leprosy and 21 cases of TB in Washington, Benton and Sebastian counties, none is a recent infection, and the two diseases are not believed to be highly contagious, officials with the Arkansas Department of Health said.
“There has never been an epidemic of leprosy,” said the Health Department’s branch chief of infectious diseases, Dr. James R. Phillips.
“Ninety-five percent of the population are genetically resistant to leprosy,” Phillips said. “And flu is magnitudesmuch-more contagious than leprosy.”
There is no clear-cut definition of “outbreak” outlining a minimum number of cases, or a time frame, for a disease, he said, but health officials generally consider a “sudden or significant” increase of a particular disorder to qualify.
A version of the report broadcast Thursday night by Fort Smith / Fayetteville channel KFSM-TV, Channel 5, reported that Springdale’s “medical community” was warning the public that a leprosy outbreak “could blossom into an epidemic.” A version of the story appeared Friday on the station’s Web site, www. kfsm. com. Phillips and Health Department spokesman Ann Wright said the story led to a flood of calls to the Health Department, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the governor’s office, congressional offices, and the Springdale mayor’s office.
By Friday, national Web sites such as The Drudge Report carried items about reported leprosy in Arkansas.
The story sent the chambers of commerce in Springdale, Rogers and Fayetteville scrambling to dispatch news releases Friday denying the existence of a leprosy outbreak in Springdale.
“You may be aware of a media report that is suggesting there has been an outbreak of leprosy in Springdale. This is not true,” wrote Perry Webb, the Springdale chamber’s president and chief executive officer.
“The Chamber has been in touch this morning with Gov. Mike Beebe, Congressman John Boozman, the Center for Disease Control and the Washington County Health Department. Each of these entities are fully engaged and are reporting to us that there is no ‘outbreak’ of leprosy in Springdale or Northwest Arkansas.”
Webb said the television station was pulling the story from its Web site Friday afternoon, a claim that KFSM News Director James Warner denied. The story had been removed from the station’s Web site as part of its follow-up reporting, he said.
The station stands by its initial story, he said.
Leprosy, also called Hansen’s disease, is a chronic infectious disease usually affecting the skin and peripheral nerves, “but that has a wide range of possible clinical manifestations,” according to the CDC. A milder form can cause “hypo-pigmented skin macules” while a more serious form can include skin lesions, nodules, plaques, a thickening of the dermis and nasal congestion. People receiving antibiotic treatment or who have completed treatment are considered free of active infection.
KFSM’s story said it based its report on statements by “local doctors,” but the only doctor it identified by name and quoted directly was Dr. Jennifer Bingham, a Springdale internist.
Bingham attempted to return a Democrat-Gazette reporter’s telephone call to her office early Friday afternoon, but return calls placed to her cell phone later in the day were not returned. “Springdale is also reporting over 100 cases of TB,” the television station reported, without further elaboration or attribution. During its 5 p. m. newscast Friday, KFSM attributed Thursday’s report to bad information supplied by local doctors.
In December 2007, state lawmakers heard a report that there were eight cases of leprosy from 2000 to 2005 among Washington County’s Marshallese population, which is concentrated in Springdale.
“We have had leprosy in Arkansas since forever,” Phillips said. “Some people get the idea that leprosy just came with the Marshallese. That’s not true.”
Roughly 75 percent of the leprosy cases in Arkansas and the United States during the last decade have been among “foreign-born individuals,” including Marshallese, Hispanics and others who have moved to this country, but they did not introduce the disease here, Phillips said.
“Every year, there were cases among native-born Arkansans — before the Marshallese ever arrived,” he said.
When it comes to TB, the percentage of foreign-born residents with the disease was smaller in Arkansas overall than elsewhere in the country, where more than 55 percent of cases were among foreign-born. That compared to 28 percent of Arkansas cases among foreign-born residents.
Medical schools don’t teach much about leprosy since there’s not much chance doctors will run across it, Phillips said, but infectious-disease specialists track it.
Most cases are contracted among family members who live in close contact for extended periods of time.
If you are someone in the 5 percent of the population who is susceptible to leprosy, “it is possible that you could walk into somebody’s [contaminated ] house, walk out in 15 minutes and be infected,” Phillips said.
“That’s theoretically possible — but statistically, not likely,” he said.
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