No Link in 2 Hospital Cases Seen : Medicine: Patient at Bakersfield hospital is in serious condition after reportedly ingesting a common pesticide. Toxicology test results are awaited in Riverside case.

A second bizarre emergency room incident in which a fuming body felled medical personnel during the Saturday evening rush was probably unrelated to the first case, authorities said Monday.

Nineteen emergency room workers at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield had to be decontaminated Saturday night after ammonia-like fumes from an unidentified 44-year-old woman caused minor dizziness, headaches and difficulties breathing.

Steve McCalley, head of Kern County’s environmental health department, said late Monday that the victim ingested a common household pesticide called Dursban, which is sold over the counter and used to kill ants and other insects.

“She ingested it in her house,” he said. “We can’t tell if it was intentional or otherwise.”

The incident mirrored one that occurred almost exactly a week earlier at Riverside General Hospital in which six emergency room personnel were injured while treating 31-year-old cancer patient Gloria Ramirez, who died. A doctor and a nurse in Riverside remain in the hospital, but none of the workers at Mercy Hospital was seriously injured and all finished their shifts.

Several local and state agencies are investigating the two incidents, but authorities cautioned that it is unlikely that any definitive answers about the Riverside case will be forthcoming until results of toxicology tests conducted on Ramirez become available later this month.

“This will take more than a 55-minute Quincy episode” to resolve, Riverside County spokesman Tom DeSantis said.

The condition of the Bakersfield patient has been upgraded to serious, but she was still on a ventilator in intensive care and unable to tell doctors what happened to her, said spokesman Rick Riley. As with Ramirez, she was brought to the hospital suffering from cardiac arrest, but Mercy Hospital personnel treated their case as a poisoning and began administering an antidote, Riley added.

The woman’s husband brought a cup of an unidentified liquid, found on the woman’s dryer, into the hospital, suggesting it might be the source of the poisoning. It was found to contain Dursban, which has an organophosphate as its primary active ingredient. Organophosphate poisoning is also suspected in the Riverside case.

Even before the identity of the poison was known, Riley downplayed any connection to the Riverside incident. “This is not completely out of the ordinary” because poisonings are common in Kern County, where farm and oil workers are sometimes overcome by fumes from pesticide spraying or oil extraction, he said.

“The hazardous waste team has had to shut down our emergency room before,” he added. “If the Riverside case had not happened, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. At the most, it would have been a small story in the local paper.”

The woman was brought into the emergency room about 10:30 Saturday night. When the emergency team inserted a breathing tube, “out rushed a really strong odor,” Riley said.

At least one nurse and a respiratory therapist complained of headaches and dizziness and one nurse had difficulty breathing because of the fumes, said Larry Call, a nursing supervisor who helped treat the patient.

“The odor was really overwhelming,” said Dr. Vaughn Morgan, who was in the emergency room at the time, along with two respiratory therapists and at least three nurses.

The symptoms subsided quickly except in the case of one nurse with asthma who took longer to recover but finished her shift, Call said. All the symptoms are consistent with Dursban exposure, McCalley said.

No developments were reported in the Ramirez case Monday, although the condition of Dr. Julie Gorchynski, who was hospitalized after the incident, was upgraded to good and she was removed from intensive care, said Loma Linda University Medical Center spokeswoman Anita Rockwell.

Nurse Sally Balderas, also injured in the incident, is now on a regular medical floor at Parkview Community Hospital in Riverside, and is “doing very good, very well,” a hospital spokeswoman said. She should be released “in the next few days.”

Blood tests on Gorchynski and Balderas suggested that they had been exposed to organophosphates, a family of chemicals that are the primary ingredients in nerve gas and many pesticides.

Pathologists from the Riverside County coroner’s office conducted an autopsy on Ramirez in the middle of the night Friday but found no explanation for the incident. No criminal investigation is in progress, DeSantis said Monday.

Cal/OSHA and the state Department of Health Services are also investigating the two incidents. Cal/OSHA is looking at them from the perspective of “what happened to the employees, any possible (safety) violations that might have been committed by the employers, and what can be done to prevent this in the future,” spokesman Paul Lynd said.

The Riverside County Fire Department was also investigating because of the report of hazardous materials.

Time staff writer Tom Gorman in Riverside contributed to this story. Arax reported from Bakersfield and Maugh reported from Los Angeles.