Florida Quarantined Tuberculosis Patients in Some Random Jacksonville Motel
Categories: Medical Waste
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| Add another motel to the "do not visit" list |
A new detail? As it turns out, closing the state's only TB hospital means patients were quarantined at a $35-a-night motel.
A Post story posted last night reveals that officials attempted to fight a Jacksonville TB outbreak by sending patients to the Monterey Motel, where they were told to stay until they weren't contagious anymore. Motel cleaning staffers were simply told to enter the rooms after the patients had been out for half an hour and to "handle trash carefully," according to the Post. They also point out that "typically, physicians and other health care workers will don special air filtering masks while in enclosed places with TB patients."
You can check out the Post's story for the details, but here's one more quote in reference to a now-frenzied effort to test Jacksonville's homeless for TB, eight months after health officials discovered the outbreak and almost a month after the state shut down the hospital:
On a recent weekday, a line snaked around the Clara White Mission starting before dawn, as homeless men and women lined up to have blood drawn by health department workers. "I know people who died," said Lawrence Webb, who rode up on a bicycle to get tested. "They would sit under the expressway with their bag lunch, just coughing. That TB is out there."Great.
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