Rikers Island inmate ill with swine flu in NYC

NEW YORK – An inmate at Rikers Island in New York City is ill with swine flu.

City Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello says the inmate complained of a cough and fever on Wednesday and went to a Queens hospital. He was confirmed to have swine flu on Friday. Morello says his condition is not serious.

Morello says the inmate entered the jail about a month ago. He did not know why he was in custody. Correction officials examined about 70 other prisoners the inmate had come into contact with during his stay and none have the flu.

An assistant principal in Queens remains hospitalized in critical condition after he was confirmed to have swine flu. Mitchell Wiener went to one of six schools closed this week in the latest outbreak in the city.

Flu Leads Rikers to Cancel Inmate Visits

The Department of Correction said Saturday that inmates at Rikers Island were advised to tell friends and relatives not to visit this weekend after it was disclosed late Friday that a prisoner received a diagnosis of probable swine flu there earlier in the week.

A prison spokesman said the inmate, who had been sent to Rikers on April 18, was admitted to the Elmhurst Hospital Center on Wednesday after complaining of flulike symptoms.

“I’m told he is not in serious condition,” the spokesman, Stephen J. Morello, said Friday night.

The disclosure came in the aftermath of six public school closings in Queens and Brooklyn on Friday because of the spread of the virus, formally known as the A(H1N1) strain.

Asked on Saturday if there are any more swine flue cases within the city corrections system, Mr. Morello said, "No."

He added that there were no new plans for treating and housing inmates with the flu.

"If more cases come forward, we may need to take similar actions in other housing areas,” Mr. Morello said, “but as of now the protocols and the policies that we have put in place are what we are going with."

He said officials have told inmates — fewer than 70 — in the two affected housing areas that, "they should call anybody who they think will come and visit and tell them not to come and visit this weekend. Those inmates will not have visits this weekend."

Mr. Morello said the Correction Department and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had developed a prevention protocol for swine flu. It includes screening every new inmate for symptoms and checking prisoners who seek medical attention for swine flu, no matter why they asked to be examined.

He said all of the areas in which the inmate with the probable case swine flu, whom he declined to identify, had been held had been sanitized. “All the other inmates in the area in which he was held, including those closest to him, have been examined,” Mr. Morello said, noting that no one else showed signs of the flu.

Mr. Morello said no inmates would be moved in or out of the two areas where the ill inmate had been housed, the Anna M. Kross Center, but that it would continue its usual operation.

The union representing guards at Rikers demanded that the Kross Center be closed. “This is a deadly disease which has proven to spread quickly and can inflict immediate harm to anyone who comes in contact with someone who shows symptoms,” said Norman Seabrook, the president of the union, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.

He said the infected inmate had been in the general population. “The hallways just going back and forth, there are dozens of inmates in the hallways,” Mr. Seabrook said. “That facility needs to be sanitized just like a school.”

He said he would tell correction officers who have worked at the Kross Center to schedule physicals with their doctors.

But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his departing health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, acknowledged Friday the city’s schools seem to have become both a sentinel and an incubator for the new H1N1 strain of flu.

“It appears at this point in schools in New York City in these days to be spreading more rapidly than traditional influenza,” Dr. Frieden said. “We don’t know why that is, but the fact we have neither a vaccine nor experience being infected with this strain of influenza are likely explanations.”

Some parents, school staff and teachers’ union officials wondered whether the city was moving too slowly to close schools with high absenteeism.

Nancy Crespo’s daughter, Alexis, a seventh grader, attends Intermediate School 238 in Queens, which was closed Thursday. She said that nearly 80 children were quarantined Tuesday in the auditorium, and that her daughter had a 102-degree fever that night. She called the school’s main office Wednesday but was brushed off, she said.

“I wish it would have been easier for me to get answers,” Ms. Crespo said.

Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal at the school, was still in critical condition Saturday and breathing on a ventilator at Flushing Hospital Medical Center.

“Nothing has gotten worse,” his son, Adam Wiener, said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “They are treating him very aggressively and we have reason to hope.”

On Friday, officials said Mr. Wiener, 55, may have had health problems that made him more vulnerable to the flu. Adam Wiener said that his father had had gout, but had it under control through medication.

Mr. Wiener’s wife, Bonnie, lashed out at the city Friday for failing to act earlier to close the school. “I know we have a duty to educate the children of New York,” said Ms. Wiener, who is a reading teacher at the same school and is not sick. But, she added, “something just doesn’t fit right.”

Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Frieden defended their caution by saying that they were trying to balance the health of students with the child-care and educational needs of families.

“Day by day we’re learning more,” Dr. Frieden said. “It’s a judgment call.”

Mr. Bloomberg added: “We close schools as infrequently as we can. Our kids need more time in school, not less.”

Late Friday, the city announced it was closing Junior High School 74 in Bayside, Queens, where 26 students had flulike symptoms; Public School 107 in Flushing, Queens, where 49 students had symptoms; and Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 53 students had symptoms. The schools will not reopen until the day after Memorial Day, according to employees at the schools.

Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ union, said her staff had received reports of high numbers of absent students at 21 schools on Friday.

She said more schools could close over the weekend, as officials analyze the reported illnesses.

With the new school closings — at least four closed for a few days earlier this month — the anxiety that had seemed to dissipate across the city began returning. Occupancy at the pediatric emergency room of Elmhurst Hospital Center, for example, was up 35 percent, with parents bringing their children in at the slightest sign of illness, though no swine flu had been confirmed there, said Dario Centorcelli, a hospital spokesman.

The virus may be spreading rapidly through schools because children are just not very good at personal hygiene, said Dr. Nathan Litman, director of pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

But he said that in a normal flu season, 30 to 40 percent of children and young adults from the ages of 5 to 15 or 20 typically are infected with flu. “So this may merely be an exaggeration of that background experience that we’ve had.”

So far, only five cases of swine flu have been confirmed among the six newly closed schools, including four students and the assistant principal. But the small number of confirmed cases — 178 citywide — is partly because the city is not trying to be comprehensive in its testing, officials said, but rather to monitor the virus’s spread.

Ms. Weingarten of the teachers’ union supported the city’s handling of the school closings. “You’re pitted against these concerns — not disrupting the school year, not panicking parents and educators and kids — versus what to do if you have a cluster of cases,” she said.