Hospital's smallpox scare turns out to be chickenpox

The extensive training designed to prepare for biological terrorism during the Olympics kicked in Tuesday as local health officials scrambled to handle a suspected case of smallpox.

After quarantine and testing and no small amount of stress, however, the man who checked into Pioneer Valley Hospital's emergency room early Tuesday turned out to have nothing more than an ordinary case of chickenpox -- albeit chickenpox exhibiting somewhat unusual symptoms.

"It had a happy ending," Salt Lake Valley Health Department spokeswoman Pamela Davenport said.

The saga began when the adult male, reportedly a truck driver from Seattle (further details are unavailable due to patient confidentiality restrictions), presented himself at 5:30 a.m. at the West Valley facility complaining of flu-like symptoms and a skin rash. Emergency-room doctors examined the rash and, using a Centers for Disease Control Web site and a poster comparing symptoms of chickenpox and smallpox, concluded there were enough signs pointing toward the latter to conclude the man might have the disease.

Smallpox was pronounced eradicated from humankind in the 1970s but still exists in lab samples and vaccines. In the wake of 9/11, many world leaders have worried that terrorists may try to use those samples to infect large populations.

The Bush administration has required smallpox vaccination for about 500,000 military personnel and is conducting a voluntary program seeking to immunize medical and emergency personnel who would be in immediate danger in a biological attack, though that program has been lagging. The Utah Department of Health announced in September that it had been awarded $15 million in federal grants to combat biological terrorism. Of that, smallpox preparedness efforts received $783,639.

"Public health in the past (before 9/11) had completely different perspectives," said Salt Lake Valley Health Department medical director Dagmar Vitek.

Pioneer Valley personnel quarantined the man within the hospital and called Salt Lake Valley Health, as they were trained to do. Vitek and two others came, examined the patient, and sent off a sample from one of the skin lesions to the Utah Department of Health for testing.

In the "fluorescent antibody" test, a stain injected into the sample will discolor if the lesion is from chickenpox. The sample discolored.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief -- not only because smallpox remains at bay, but because the procedure put in place to combat and contain biological terrorism had functioned as planned, even serving as a dry run in case the real thing ever occurs.

"My conclusion at the end of the day is the system worked pretty well," said state epidemiologist Robert Rolfs.

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