Revised Work Rules to Fight Hepatitis Please the Disabled

Following a legal challenge by advocates for the disabled, Orange County health officials have decided to pare down work restrictions for developmentally disabled people aimed at stemming a hepatitis A outbreak.

In response to the changes, advocates told a federal judge Friday that they have decided to drop their opposition to county restrictions that target food workers and those caring for children and the elderly.

“We want to congratulate the county for its willingness to sit down and negotiate on this,” said Eric R. Gelber, an attorney representing the developmentally disabled, “though we still don’t believe the restrictions are legally or factually justified.

“They are still based on the assumption that people with developmental disabilities pose a threat to public health and that is based on false stereotypes about them.”

A dispute came after a March 24 order by the county Health Care Agency that banned all developmentally disabled people who have had recent contact with others in care facilities from working in certain jobs until they could prove they are immune to hepatitis A.

The ban came after 17 developmentally disabled people in the county contracted hepatitis A, a virus that can be spread through contaminated food or physical contact. As of last week, as many as 20 cases had been reported.

Advocates for the disabled contended that the scope of the county’s restrictions was unfairly broad.

The new restrictions, announced Thursday, are expected to reduce the number of developmentally disabled people affected by the rules from 300 to 200. They also will be imposed only in eight cities in the northern and central part of the county where hepatitis cases have been reported--instead of countywide--and will allow for county health officials to consider cases individually.

Deputy County Counsel Thomas Agin told U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge John E. Ryan that the agency did not revise its rules because of negotiations earlier in the week with advocates for the disabled, but because agency health workers have been able to better pinpoint where the outbreak is occurring.

“We do not believe the county did anything wrong in the first place or that it is continuing to do anything wrong,” Agin said.

Gelber, an attorney for Protection and Advocacy Inc., a Sacramento-based nonprofit group representing developmentally disabled clients, had filed a motion March 31 in bankruptcy court seeking to overturn the county’s March 24 order.

During a hearing Monday, Judge Ryan--who is handling the county’s bankruptcy--agreed that the original restrictions were too broad, and encouraged both sides to compromise.

The new order still targets disabled workers in the community who handle food or care for children or the elderly. It also requires that most of these job holders submit to a vaccine and refrain from working until the vaccine produces immunity, usually in two weeks to a month.

But it limits the restrictions to those developmentally disabled workers living in Anaheim, Brea, Fountain Valley, Fullerton, Orange, Placentia, Santa Ana and Yorba Linda. It also allows a developmentally disabled worker to ask the health agency for special permission to return to work without having to prove immunity to the virus. If the worker tests negative for the virus, for example, the worker can try to persuade a health officer that he or she is capable of taking the necessary precautions--such as frequent hand-washing--to keep from contracting or spreading the virus.

Ryan made no rulings on the matter Friday, but presided over the advocates’ withdrawal of their motion to block the work restrictions.

The new rules will allow Richard Harris, a developmentally disabled man who had been forced from his job, to return to his work filling condiment containers at a restaurant. Harris, 43, is no longer affected by the ban because he lives in Costa Mesa.

But Harris said that although he has tested negative for the virus, his boss will not allow him to return until he can show that he has been cleared by the health agency.

“I’m still worried that I might not be able to go back to work,” Harris said. “I hope I get my job back soon. I don’t know what else to do.”

Protection and Advocacy Inc. also filed a class-action suit on behalf of five developmentally disabled men, including Harris, who have been temporarily forced from their jobs because of the order. Gelber told Ryan that his group still plans to pursue the suit.