2 More in County Show Signs of SARS

With two more suspected cases of SARS reported in Orange County on Thursday, area hospitals are working to ensure that patients with the pneumonia-like illness are identified quickly and isolated, and that medical personnel and other patients are protected from exposure.

Doctors don’t know if they will see many patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome, but hospitals are taking precautions and stockpiling supplies at the recommendation of state health officials.

The new cases bring the county total to four, with 35 reported statewide, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services said Thursday.

The two patients are in their 50s and recent visitors to China. One has been released from the hospital, and the other was expected to be discharged soon, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency. The two other patients also visited China.

None of the 100 U.S. cases has been fatal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Worldwide, there have been 2,270 cases, 79 of them fatal, according to the World Health Organization.

The state Department of Health Services has sent two faxes to every licensed acute care hospital in California telling them how to deal with suspected SARS patients and will soon send a third, said Jon Rosenberg, a medical epidemiologist with the division of communicable disease control.

Many medical facilities, including a UC Irvine clinic in Westminster, have placed multi-lingual signs in their emergency rooms telling people to notify the nurse if they have a cough or trouble breathing and have traveled to Asia within 10 days or have been in close contact with someone who has.

Those are the symptoms of SARS, along with a temperature of at least 100.5 degrees and an abnormal chest X-ray.

At Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, triage nurses ask patients if they have recently traveled to Toronto, where several suspected cases have been reported, said Rosalie DeSantis, a registered nurse who is the hospital’s infection control program manager.

Canada has reported six deaths from SARS, according to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Donald N. Forthal, chief of infectious diseases at UCI Medical Center in Orange, said patients suspected of having the illness will be treated like others with serious infections that can be transmitted through close contact or the air, such as measles, chicken pox or tuberculosis.

In two cases where people arrived at Hoag saying they thought they might have SARS, medical staffers immediately donned surgical masks and placed them on the patients, DeSantis said.

The patients were put in negative-pressure rooms, where air does not circulate back into the hospital.

One patient was ruled out as a suspected case of SARS because he lacked a fever, the other because a lung X-ray was clear, DeSantis said.

Hospitals are stocking up on sanitary gloves, surgical masks, gloves and even goggles to ensure SARS infections don’t spread to other patients and medical workers.