By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
“It’s very scary,” said Adrian Petta.
As Petta waited for her 3-year-old outside Yardville Elementary School today, she described waiting to find out what killed a little boy who attended the same preschool. He died last Thursday, while school was closed for Rosh Hashanah. It reopened Friday, but Petta said, “For the first couple of days we didn’t know anything — what the symptoms were, the particulars of what happened to him.”
By Monday, attendance dropped to 65 percent as parents like Petta kept kids home.
“I didn’t send her on Monday because we still didn’t know anything,” she said.
At the Monday night meeting called by school officials where anxious parents demanded answers. Tests showed the 4-year-old died of flu-like symptoms but didn’t have influenza, according to health officials. The CDC was testing samples for enterovirus D68.
“Once we got the symptoms of what the little boy had, we felt a little bit better about, OK, this is what we should watch out for,” Petta said.
“I would feel fairly confident that everyone got the message,” said Hamilton Health Officer Jeffrey Plunkett. “The attendance the next day in school was back up to 90 percent.”
Hamilton Township’s health officer described efforts to disinfect the classroom, calm the parents and follow CDC protocols.
“Every toy was removed, sanitized, the furniture was removed, the carpet was steam cleaned by professional outside service,” he said.
“Kids touch everything and put everything in their mouths so it’s very important to disinfect properly all equipment and toys, furniture with a bleach solution,” said Infectious disease specialist Dr. Seth Rosenbaum. “One should be worried when someone has worsening respiratory symptoms.”
Rosenbaum, infectious disease specialist at Robert Wood Johnson-Hamilton, says D68’s most dangerous to kids with asthma and respiratory issues. And doctors report a few rare cases of paralysis, though not in New Jersey.
“There hasn’t been a direct correlation yet with the enterovirus. Many viruses do cause neurological limb weakness in regards to respiratory illness, like West Nile virus,” he said.
Petta says she took her daughter to the doctor just for a checkup. All’s well.
“I’ve seen them out here cleaning everything so I’m pretty confident they’re all gonna be OK,” she said.
“In our opinion it would be much worse to not have information — or or half truths — than be able to tell the true statement when we had all the information,” said Plunkett.
For government and school officials, the tension’s unavoidable in situations like this. How much do they tell the parents and when: to inform, not frighten.
Related: State Epidemiologist: NJ Hospitals Prepared for Enterovirus D68