Death toll from San Diego hepatitis A outbreak rises to 18

Another death was connected to San Diego’s ongoing hepatitis A outbreak Tuesday even as the number of confirmed cases and hospitalizations showed their smallest increases in weeks.

The county Health and Human Services Agency released its weekly update on the outbreak Tuesday morning, bumping the number of deaths from 17 to 18. The number of confirmed cases grew by nine, jumping from 481 to 490. Hospitalizations increased from 337 to 342.

County public health officials have said for several weeks that they have been awaiting confirmation from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labs in Atlanta that the death resulted from the outbreak. The death announced Tuesday occurred in September and was caused by one of the same hepatitis A strains associated with other cases that have spread primarily among the region’s homeless residents and illicit drug users since November 2016.

Last week, outbreak case and hospitalization counts both jumped by 20, making this week’s change in weekly totals look comparatively small. It does not appear, though, that there has been a significant drop in the number of suspected hepatitis A cases reported to the county health department each week.

The number of suspected hepatitis A cases detected each week was about 20 from May to August, and the rate has been “two to three per day” in recent weeks, Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said Tuesday in a presentation to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

Wooten said that there were still 47 suspected cases under investigation, the same number that a county official cited last week. Wooten also said that one additional death is currently under investigation.

Because it takes weeks for the CDC to confirm that each case was caused by the same hepatitis A strains identified in the county’s outbreak, the official number of confirmed cases always lags behind preliminary totals.

Sisson writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.