THUNDER BAY — As the winds that blow off the northern shores of Lake Superior grow colder, the streets and trees of Thunder Bay become more bare.
It’s a natural passing of the seasons, but in a community long plagued by unemployment, drug use and doctor shortages, health officials have expressed concern that the winter season may strengthen the storm of invasive Group A streptococcus, also known as IGAS, that has reached this northern community.
About 75 people in the area surrounding and including this city of about 109,000 have become infected and at least 10 have died. Health officials have known of the outbreak of contagious bacteria for months but informed the public only last week.
The eye of the strep storm has sat over the city’s south core, where drug users take shelter from the cold in abandoned buildings.
In those crowded dens on Simpson Street, where bathrooms, needles and pipes are shared, IGAS can spread like wildfire and the Thunder Bay District Health Unit has defended its silence about the outbreak by saying the risk of infection was concentrated there, not among the general population.
Lee Sieswerda, Thunder Bay District Health Unit’s epidemiologist, has said about 38 per cent of those infected were intravenous drug users, and 15 per cent were “underhoused.”
But according to Elizabeth Alvarez, who was the health unit’s associate medical officer of health until June, when her contract wasn’t renewed, the decision not to go public was initially based on the widespread group of people who’d become infected, which included children and the elderly. She said there were concerns that an announcement would create larger crowds in the city’s only emergency room, which has the largest volume of patients in Ontario.
“I felt that we should have gone earlier to the media, I’m a big believer in getting things out. But others worried that there was nothing to pinpoint a cause or a source,” she said recently in an interview from her new home in Hamilton.
The heart of the city’s south core is an aging mall, the Victoriaville Centre. Rows of discount clothing stores bathed in yellow light lead to a central food court where the elderly, mothers with strollers, drug dealers and drug users converge at square tables that have been bolted to the ground.
Blocks away, the grandest houses in Thunder Bay – large brick three-storey edifices with ornate porches – sit among old spruce and maple trees.
In this city that has hemorrhaged jobs and money over the past decade with the decline of the lumber industry, discarded syringes are a commonplace sight.
Sean Lee, a 30-year-old drug user, can recall the weekend he contracted a strep infection. It was August and he was “slumming it” on Simpson Street, injecting his veins with cocaine.
“I wish I’d known, I would have been more careful,” he said recently, seated at one of those square tables in the Victoriaville Centre. The strep ravaged his body for weeks and he lost so much weight his skin encases to his 6-foot-2 frame like cling-wrap.
But Annette Swerdelyk will likely never know how she caught the infection that nearly took her leg, and her life. The 52-year-old mother of two plays over and over again in her head the day in late May when she grazed her knee outside a laundromat. She had no idea an aggressive strain of streptococcus was moving through the area, as health officials had decided that the bacteria posed a low risk to members of the “general population” like Ms. Swerdelyk.
Her knee swelled for several days before she went to the emergency room, where doctors told her they were “gridlocked” with patients and sent her home with a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics. She returned the next day, her knee swollen to twice its size, the pain unbearable. She was admitted to hospital and quarantined.
“I thought I was going to die, I’m lucky I didn’t,” she said recently, seated on a couch in her home gingerly touching the large purple scar above her knee-cap. “They were talking about amputating my leg at the hip. I was … [in my] hospital bed crying like a baby.”
Ms. Swerdelyk spent nearly two weeks in hospital and was sent home with a pick-line that injected antibiotics directly into her bloodstream.
A faint purple tinge lingers on her left leg, a sense of betrayal lingers in her mind: It was only days ago that she picked up a local newspaper and realized she’d been part of an outbreak.
“When you have something that serious going on, the public needs to know,” she said, her brown eyes narrowing. “They’re stereotyping who gets this disease and it’s not true.”
Streptococcus is a fairly common bacteria, but the underlying causes of IGAS outbreaks remain unknown, Dr. Alvarez said. When she left the investigation, the health unit was researching whether residents of northern communities had increased susceptibility to the infection, she said, but like Ms. Swerdelyk, it is likely the Thunder Bay region will never know why it was struck.
With a report from Canadian Press
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