Man Jailed For Refusing To Take Tb Drugs Homeless Patient With Infectious Disease Refused To Honor Quarantine, Medications

A man deemed a public health risk for refusing to take his tuberculosis medicine has been jailed in Thurston County.

Kenneth Elkins, who was jailed in mid-March, could remain in prison for up to 180 days.

“It’s maddening to have to resort to these kinds of measures when this person obviously doesn’t have any desire to manage his life,” said County Commissioner Judy Wilson, a former nurse, on Wednesday. “This is your tax dollars at work.”

Health officials discovered in November that Elkins, who has lived in the county since last summer when he was released from McNeil Island Penitentiary, - had infectious TB.

Because antibiotic treatments for the disease can take as long as a year, patients have to be quarantined during early, contagious stages. Afterward, they still have to take medicine daily for as long as six months so they don’t develop a drug-resistant strain of the disease.

Elkins, 44, was homeless and the health department paid for him to stay in a motel during the quarantine, said Marianne Remy, a county public health nurse manager.

A nurse visited him daily to watch him take the pills. But, according to court documents, Elkins would “escape” his room for trips to a discount store, the motel office and downtown Olympia.

“I goofed up,” Elkins told The News Tribune of Tacoma.

He said he now wanted to take the medication and get better. But he added that he thought the county had overreacted.

Pat Libbey, director of Thurston County Public Health and Social Service Department, said more extreme measures were taken because Elkins refused to cooperate.

“We started on a voluntary level,” Libbey said. “(But) he was not staying in one place. He was infectious.”

As a result, the county confined him in Western State Hospital for 10-1/2 weeks until he wasn’t contagious, which could end up costing as much as $30,000, Libbey said. After his release from Western on Feb. 12, Elkins was supposed to go to the health department to take his pills. But he didn’t keep his appointments, Libbey said.

Health officials successfully petitioned the court to jail him after he ignored several warnings.

An insulin-dependent diabetic who’s partly paralyzed, Elkins said he never fully understood the dangers of the disease.

“I didn’t know it was that dangerous,” said Elkins, who said he’s spent about eight years in prison since 1972 on forgery convictions. “I didn’t know it could kill someone. They might have given me enough (information), but I didn’t understand it.”

Elkins, who is no longer contagious, is housed with the general jail population at the cost of $62.54 a day, Wilson said.

County corrections officials plan to go to Thurston County Superior Court on Friday to try to work out another plan for Elkins, said county Chief of Corrections Karen Daniels.

Counties historically have been responsible for regulating the deadly airborne bacterial disease, considered a threat to public health if untreated. State law allows counties to ask courts to jail people who refuse to take medication.

A TB patient also is jailed in Vancouver to make sure he complies with treatment.