- ALTAMONTE SPRINGS
- The man had died the day before, while nursing student Florence Adler
helplessly tried to make him comfortable. She could not have known, but
the smallpox patient must have felt as if his skin was on fire.
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- The man, one of America's last cases of smallpox, never
knew what he had. Even Adler did not learn until she read the newspaper
the next day. She had not seen smallpox before his case in 1947, and she
hopes never to see it again.
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- "It was unheard of in the U.S. by that time,"
said Adler, of Altamonte Springs, who was training back then at the Willard
Parker Hospital for Communicable Diseases in New York City. "It was
something we read about in books and saw in the movies, but who would ever
expect to see it here?"
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- Adler, who was 22 in 1947, stood in line for hours that
day waiting to get a booster shot of smallpox vaccination. In barely a
month, about 6 million New Yorkers were vaccinated as fear of the highly
contagious disease known as "the scourge" ricocheted through
the city.
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- Adler, now 76, expected to leave smallpox in her memory,
but she thinks about the disease more since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
and the ongoing anthrax problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
says smallpox could be a potentially devastating tool of bioterrorists.
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- Few Americans have first-hand experience with the disease.
The last U.S. case was documented in 1949, according to the CDC, although
the disease remained a serious problem in other parts of the world for
decades more.
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- The World Health Organization launched an international
vaccination program for smallpox in 1967 and managed to track down the
last known case on the planet in Somalia in 1977.
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- Adler's patient had come into the hospital while she
was helping with admissions. She questioned him, filled out his paperwork
and was assigned with another student to care for him exclusively.
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- The doctors suspected that the man, who had just returned
from Mexico, had a bad case of chickenpox. It made sense at first. The
childhood illness usually causes serious disease in adults, and what Adler
saw was heartbreaking.
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- The sores covering his skin were already white pustules
when the man arrived at the hospital. Adler could not find any clear skin
to give him shots of sedatives. His eyes were bright red, glowing like
headlights. Though he was walking and talking at first, the man's condition
quickly degenerated. He died a day and a half after being admitted.
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- "It was such a virulent, fast disease, and he was
in such pain. It went like wildfire," Adler said. "There were
two of us assigned to care for him solely, he was that sick, and we did
everything possible to make him comfortable, but it was useless."
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- When doctors determined the true source of his illness,
Adler was not particularly concerned for herself. She had been vaccinated
once before, and she felt even more secure with her second inoculation.
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- "Somehow, I wasn't worried about dying," Adler
said. "At 22, nobody thinks about that."
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- Though the victim had been kept in a room by himself,
he was not sufficiently isolated to prevent spreading the smallpox virus.
The viral rash always lines a patient's throat, filling his or her saliva
with the disease.
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- Every cough or exhale potentially can release the virus
into the air as tiny water droplets, which others may breathe in. Alder
remembers that at least 20 other patients at Willard Parker Hospital became
ill with smallpox.
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- She also recalls that patients two miles away at Bellevue
Hospital became ill, assumedly after the virus was carried from one building
to the other via doctors, nurses or shared cleaning staff.
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- Official accounts of the New York cases offer various
statistics about the outbreak. But at least one other patient -- in addition
to the original victim -- died.
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- Adler, who worked as a public health nurse before leaving
the field to raise a family, had gone into nursing after she broke her
leg at 18 and was impressed by the care she received in another New York
hospital.
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- Even if she had known the man had smallpox, she still
would have been at his bedside, Adler said.
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- "As a nurse, you don't go and leave a patient hanging,"
Adler said. "I would have done my job."
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