Slides Deliver Itchy Doses of Poison Oak

In a freak side effect of the Laguna Canyon mudslides, many slide victims are suffering from poison oak.

Canyon residents, rescue workers and others who volunteered after the slide have been plagued with rashes from poison oak sap that washed down in the mud from the hillsides above.

“It’s all over my body,” said Tangerine Bolen, who lost her home and most of her belongings in the Feb. 23 slide.

“It’s just rampant,” said Eloise Woolcott, a volunteer at the Resource Center, a local agency aiding the victims. “Residents, volunteers--everybody’s got it.”

One local doctor treated six cases in the past week and Woolcott estimates that nearly 50 people may have been afflicted. The center has been doling out bottles and tubes of anti-itch ointment to blistering sufferers.

The poison oak shrub contains a sap that is a powerful allergen, said Dr. Bill Anderson, the medical director of the Walk-In Family Care Clinic on Ocean Avenue, who diagnosed six cases. The torrents of rain that caused the sliding also washed the sap from greening shrubs into the mud that then swamped canyon residents.

The current outbreak is “more than I’ve ever seen,” he said.

While uncomfortable, poison oak is easily treatable and not contagious, Anderson said. He recommended that people with early signs of a poison oak reaction avoid scratching, which spreads it, apply anti-itch ointment and wash all clothes that might have come in contact with the sap.