Bug bites + worried mom + flight from Uganda = monkeypox scare. But all clear. (chicagotribune.com)
Here’s the CDC’s statement.
By Andy Grimm and Deanese Williams-Harris, Chicago Tribune reporters April 27, 2012
A Minnesota woman who caused a health scare aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Detroit — resulting in the plane being kept on the tarmac at Midway Airport for three hours — says it was all a misunderstanding over bug bites. Lise Sievers of Red Wing was one of 43 passengers aboard Delta flight 3163 to Midway when it touched down and the captain announced the plane would be briefly quarantined. Men with surgical masks over their faces boarded the plane, and rumors flew as passengers tried to figure out what sort of contagion might be spreading through the cabin. Sievers, 50, who was on the tail end of a 20-plus hour trip that began in Uganda, where she had spent more than three months trying to finalize the adoption of two special-needs children, wondered as well, said her son, Roger Sievers. During a layover in Detroit, she had called her mother in La Porte, Ind., and mentioned one of the children she was trying to adopt had broken out in pustules — small, pimplelike sores — during her visit, and that the boy had to be taken to the hospital in Uganda. Sievers also mentioned to her mother that she had suffered an unrelated case of itchy bites which she believed had been inflicted by bedbugs. While Sievers’ flight was en route to Midway, her mother confused Sievers’ bug bites and the boy’s pustules, and called her local hospital to ask what she should do to prepare to treat her daughter’s symptoms. “Any time you mention you’ve been in a tropical country like Uganda and you’ve developed what sounds like an infectious disease, well, they call the CDC right away,” Roger Sievers said, referring to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
