Health Officials Seek to Ease Virus Panic

Senior British health officials sought Friday to play down the widely circulated press reports that a deadly bacteria is threatening the population.

“The public should be reassured there is no killer bug sweeping the country,” said Dr. Diana Walford, director of the Public Health Laboratory Service, attacking the barrage of publicity.

She said there have been 15 cases of the disease, called necrotising fasciitis, since Jan. 1--a rate of occurrence that she said is not out of the ordinary.

News that the disease was breaking out in parts of Gloucestershire in western England surfaced last weekend, and the British tabloid press painted horrifying visions of a virus that can devour human flesh in a matter of hours.

“Curse of the Killer Bacteria,” bannered the Sun, Britain’s largest-selling daily, and “Flesh Bug Ate My Brother in 18 Hours.”

“I Watched Killer Bug Eat My Body,” read another tabloid’s headlines.

Even more sedate papers, such as the Times of London, reported: “Bacteria That Eat the Flesh” and “Flesh-Eater on the Move.”

Walford said press reports give the impression that the 15 cases--11 of which resulted in death--all occurred in a sudden epidemic, instead of over the last five months.

She stressed that necrotising fasciitis, a virulent form of the streptococcus bacteria, “remains a rare disease.”

The British scare has generated worldwide concern, with governments from Austria to New Zealand checking the incidence of infection. In Norway, the disease has killed 25 people so far this year, the country’s National Institute of Public Health said.

U.S. officials estimated that up to 450 Americans may have died each year from 1989 to 1991 from the infection, according to the World Health Organization.

British Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley appealed for calm, insisting that everything possible is being done to fight the bug.

“There is no evidence that the numbers we are seeing are untoward,” Bottomley said. “It is important not to get it out of proportion. This is a situation where everything that can be done has been done.”

Government officials did acknowledge that the disease could be horrifying to those who contract it. The infection attacks the fleshy parts of the body, eating it away like gangrene. In the worst cases, death can occur within hours.

“I feel enormously for anyone who has a member of the family involved,” Bottomley said, “but I don’t want every family in the country to be panicked.”

The tabloid press sent reporters to find victims and their relatives, and recounted their stories in lurid tales that invoked images of an outer-space invasion.

As the Financial Times suggested: “Mutant flesh-eating super-bugs, capable of killing a healthy adult within hours, are rampaging their way through Britain. Or, to put it another way, the media is indulging in one of its periodic frenzies of terrifying the public with a medical horror story.”

Dr. Christopher Barlett, director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Center, said, “Public anxiety should be allayed by the fact that we have examined all indicators of streptococcal infection in the country and these are demonstrating no change in either numbers or patterns of infection.