By Tom Wilemon | The Tennessean
It was just an email about a single case of illness, but a gut instinct developed through years of disease detective work made Dr. Marion Kainer sense a bigger danger.
Kainer, the director of health care associated infections for the Tennessee Department of Health, started investigating the day she got that email and hasn't stopped since. She camped out in her office for three weeks, leading a team of state workers as they traced the source of what would become a national outbreak of fungal meningitis.
Within the first three days, they had enough evidence to alert federal officials of the burgeoning crisis. They had pain clinics removing suspect medicine from shelves before other states had even determined who had it in stock. Those actions kept the outbreak from affecting more Tennesseans.
The outbreak that they identified, linked to contaminated epidural steroid injections from a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts, has sickened 404 people nationwide, killing 29 of them. The toll would be higher -- with a high potential for public panic -- had it not been for Tennessee, said Dr. Paul Jarris, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
"By the time we learned this was a problem around the country, the information from Tennessee had already narrowed it down to what the problem was," Jarris said. "Imagine how frightening it would have been if 23 states had a meningitis outbreak and we didn't know what caused it."
He called the actions of the Tennessee Department of Health "a textbook case of how to do it right."
Tenn. acted early.
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