Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Utah, come for Salt Lake City, stay for the hep. No wait, that’s not a good motto.
According to Daily Mail, as many as 2,000 people in Salt Lake County may have gotten hepatitis A after visiting a local 7-Eleven store where one of its employees was diagnosed with the virus and still came to work during their infectious period.
And this is occurring during an outbreak that has seen the disease resurge in places like Utah, California, Michigan and Kentucky.
The county health department issued a warning on Sunday, urging anyone who had visited the store in West Jordan, just south of the state’s capital, between December 26 2017 and January 3 2018 to get vaccinated. So far, there have been no confirmed additional cases as a result of exposures in the convenience store, but this is the first time the virus has moved from homeless and drug-using populations into the general public in the state.
Outbreaks of hepatitis A began cropping up sporadically throughout the US in March of 2017, spurring the California government to declare a public health emergency. Until now, Utah’s outbreak had been confined to about 152 cases among the state’s homeless population and illicit drug users.
Just over 70 percent of those had occurred in Salt Lake County, the state’s largest, but the 7-Eleven case is the first known instance of the virus’s communication outside the particularly at-risk groups.
And for those that don’t know, Hep A can cause fever, diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain, and if left untreated can be deadly.
Good luck to you, Utah.
