Health specialist recalls story of infection
Appalled at 'cavalier' attitude in her workplace
Hoping to sensitize Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) officials to the need for protecting workers outside hospital or clinic settings, the Service Employees International Union had one of its members recount her harrowing experience of becoming infected with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis on the job and receiving what she deemed as an inadequate response from her employer.
Two years ago, Alice Beasley, an environmental health specialist, was working for the Riverside, CA, Department of Environmental Health, when she came into contact with Barbara Cole, the county's director of disease control, who worked two floors below her in a four-story administration building. Meeting behind closed doors in the director's office, Beasley asked the director if she would speak at a profession seminar. She noticed that the director looked thin and was coughing, according to her testimony at an OSHA public hearing on the standard in Washington in April.
Three months later, Beasley helped the director set up her audio visual equipment at the seminar. The director coughed in pain, holding her arms across her abdomen. She told Beasley she had bronchitis, according to Beasley's testimony.
Three months passed before Beasley, home on vacation, was informed that an employee in her office building was diagnosed with TB and that she needed a TB test. Having received a negative skin test the year before, Beasley was surprised to find that she tested positive, with a 15 mm induration. She and 14 other employees tested positive, and eight of those employees were thought to have been exposed in the workplace, she testified.
During an appointment with Herbert Giese, the health department's interim health officer, Beasley testified that she was told Cole was not the source of her infection.
"I told him about my contact with Barbara Cole. Dr. Giese dismissed this by saying that her disease became active in November, after my last contact with her. He was inclined to believe I was infected in Mexico (which she had visited a year earlier)," she said.
Beasley was prescribed a two-drug regimen (pyrazinamide and floxin) for six months but found it difficult to tolerate. "Most of the other people had to stop taking the drugs because it made them too sick," she noted.
Describing noteworthy events that exacerbated the exposure, Beasley said Cole was diagnosed with active TB on Dec. 4, 1996, but did not immediately leave work. "After-hours logs showed that Barbara returned to work on occasion over the next few weeks without medical clearance," she reported.
Beasley also expressed dismay at health officials' response to the exposure. Initially, only employees in disease control were tested. Not until an occupational nurse complained and an employee on the third floor was found positive, were employees in the entire building tested, she noted.
"It is outrageous to me that the Health Services Agency responded so slowly to this crisis and was initially unwilling to test the whole building or any of Barbara's outside contacts," Beasley wrote to an epidemiologist at Cal- OSHA. "When they finally did test everyone in the building, those who tested positive were told they didn't get it from work."
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