Canada Town Buries Dead, Waits For E. Coli To Kill More

Pam Smith can handle changing her daughters’ bedsheets four times a night. She can cope with 6-month-old Jillian’s diarrhea, with 2-year-old Courtney’s spiking fever and with 4-year-old Ashley’s agony as the girl, cradled in her mother’s arms, wretches in the darkness from thumping stomach cramps.

What has driven this young mother beyond despair, however, is the torture of not knowing whether the worst E. coli outbreak in Canadian history has finished ravaging her family.

“You get up 15 times in the night to make sure they are no worse, and you hug them and kiss them and tell them you love them, because you don’t know if one night they are going to get so sick that they aren’t going to hear you anymore,” said Smith, 24, her voice heaving and then breaking.

“And you pray,” she said, “You pray that it’s not going to be too late.”

It’s a mother’s prayer, one that is drifting from bedroom to bedroom across this town of 5,000 in the farmlands of Ontario.

At least five people have died and as many as 1,000 others are sick - many of them children in critical condition. Canadian officials say it is an outbreak unlike anything they have ever seen. It happened when a deadly form of the bacterium known as E. coli 0157 contaminated the Walkerton water supply.

The town’s utility officials knew last week that the water supply was tainted but didn’t warn the public until this week - after hundreds had become infected. For some time, the town’s chlorination system - which could have killed the bacteria - hadn’t been working properly, officials said Thursday.

The deadly debacle has local and provincial police considering a criminal investigation.

More people are expected to die as the bacteria ravages its victims’ kidneys and destroys their red blood cells, Canadian health officials said. Although most infected people are expected to recover completely, some will be left with permanent damage to their kidneys and may require lifelong dialysis.

“There’s never been anything like this in Canada before, of this magnitude, never,” said Dr. Murray McQuigge, the provincial health officer for the region.

Parents’ worst fear

As politicians trade charges of responsibility for the outbreak, as doctors offer updates on the sick and the dying, the mothers and fathers of Walkerton - many ill themselves - are taking one last lingering peek at night into the bedrooms down the hall.

In a working-class neighborhood across town from the Smiths, Barb Vyhnal absently rubbed her hands in her kitchen apron as she described the terror of watching blood flow from her daughter’s stool. Blood in diarrhea is one of the telltale signs of the deadly bacteria.

“It’s very scary and you start crying a lot,” Vyhnal said of the last week spent caring for her 11-year-old daughter, Renata, who is only now starting to feel better.

Like so many mothers in Walkerton, Vyhnal wrote off her daughter’s initial fever, sore throat and abdominal cramps as the flu and gave her daughter Gatorade to fight dehydration. By last weekend, Vyhnal was one of scores of concerned parents calling the local hospital to check rumors that the town’s water supply was tainted.

The hospital, apparently relying on the assurances of Walkerton’s utility officials, told callers the water was fine - and to keep ill family members hydrated.

It was not until Sunday that residents were told to boil water, and Tuesday before the E. coli bacteria threat was announced publicly. In the days since, residents have expressed fury after it became known that the Public Utilities Commission, which monitors water supplies, had known of E. coli in the water on May 18, but did not immediately disclose it.

“It made me angry,” said Eleanor Shoemaker, a 53-year-old grandmother who has been sick. “They should have told the people right away.”

Inquiry begins

On Friday, police began an investigation. Richard Kotwa, a provincial police superintendent, said the inquiry was not considered a criminal investigation yet, but could rise to that level.

The inquiry is focusing on why the local Public Utilities Commission, which supplies water and electricity to Walkerton, delayed in telling health authorities that town wells were tainted.

Jim Kieffer, chairman of the commission, said utility workers may not have realized the dangers of E. coli.

Ontario Premier Mike Harris visited Walkerton on Friday and told residents: “I pledge we will get to the bottom of this tragedy.”

The outbreak is thought to be linked to a fierce rainstorm and flood two weeks ago. By the evening of May 12, the banks of the Saugeen River were overflowing, with two tributaries upstream of Walkerton reaching their highest levels in more than a decade.

Health officials suspect the water supply became contaminated that night, as animal manure infiltrated the aquifer that feeds the town’s three wells, exposing Walkerton’s 5,000 residents to the deadly bacteria.

Walkerton’s residents may have passed the bacteria to others through hand-to-hand contact.

The bacteria can incubate in humans for up to a week or more after exposure. The first reports of diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and fever began to filter in to the town’s doctors in the middle of last week. By May 18, rumors of food poisoning began to circulate at the high school.

By last Friday McQuigge was sufficiently alarmed by the threat of E. coli that he called Walkerton’s Public Utility Commission. McQuigge said he was told the water was safe. Unbeknownst to McQuigge, the PUC began to flush the water system about the time of his call.

As the outbreak toll climbed, McQuigge called water officials twice more on Saturday and said he again was told the water was safe.

By Sunday, McQuigge was no longer willing to wait. Suspecting the water was unsafe, he ordered town residents to boil drinking water for at least five minutes or use bottled water.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that the utility commission announced that E. coli was in the water system. Schools and day-care centers were advised not to use tap water for hand washing.

Anger against the local utility has intensified this week with the deaths of four adult residents and one baby. At least four children are in critical condition and are receiving dialysis as a result of kidney failure.

The daily routines of 1,800 households have changed dramatically in the wake of the outbreak. Residents must patiently wait for water to boil on stovetops for drinking, washing, or bathing. Many residents are traveling to neighboring towns to fill water jugs.

Townspeople spend their days stripping beds, washing walls and floors and everything else with bleach, trying to ward off the bacteria. Parents long accustomed to telling their children to wash their hands now hesitate, adding the instruction to use a splash of bleach.

Some people have not showered in days. Others hesitate to use old toothbrushes.

“Actually, we should be throwing out our toothbrushes,” said Martha Rapp, who belatedly switched to bottled water by her sink. “Too late now, I suppose.”

Rapp has virtually bathed her home in bleach - determined that grandchildren Dale, 13, and Angela, 8, remain healthy.

When she is not scrubbing, Rapp waits anxiously by the phone. Another grandchild, 3-year-old Brody, lies in a London, Ontario, hospital in critical condition.

“There are children in intensive care who are not getting better, they are getting worse,” Dr. Douglas Matsell, a pediatric kidney specialist, said of patients airlifted to a hospital in London. “I worry that there will be more deaths.”

Illness spreads

Some illnesses have spread beyond Walkerton. Two Windsor women who visited Walkerton recently complained of E. coli symptoms. One woman spent four days in Windsor Regional Hospital, a hospital spokesman said. Her case was confirmed Friday.

And in Waterloo, Ontario, 12 people who recently visited Walkerton have complained of E. coli infection.

In Walkerton, some residents remain perfectly healthy, but carefully monitor their bodies for signs of the illness.

Every time Florence Birr heard a medical helicopter pass over her house late Thursday, she wondered if the water she drank Sunday would make her ill.

“Ten days, you know,” said Birr, 73, referring to the incubation period before symptoms may appear. “I’m still concerned, I really am.”

Canadian flags were at half-staff Friday as Walkerton began burying its dead. Mourners somberly entered Sacred Heart Church in the morning to pay their respects to Lenore Al, the town’s retired librarian, who died from the outbreak.

At a Friday morning press conference, hospital officials announced the arrival of 10 doses of an experimental drug to combat E. coli. They acknowledge the drug is no cure-all.

“Everyone would like to find something magical,” said Maureen Solecki, the weary spokesperson for the South Bruce-Grey Health Centre.

Coping

There are moments when Pam Smith, the mother of three, feels paralyzed by the enormity of protecting her children.

“I’m embarrassed that I’m too scared to wash, too scared to do anything,” she said. “It’s hard to cope.”

She apologized repeatedly for the disaster in her kitchen, where a table was cluttered with breakfast dishes and half-eaten apples. Her older daughters, Ashley and Courtney, were nearby in the kitchen as her husband, Trevor, checked on 6-month-old Jillian upstairs.

Jillian, a blue-eyed charmer with tufts of blonde hair, stopped nursing from her mother when the diarrhea hit last week. “Devastating” is how Pam Smith described an infant who simply would not eat.

Jillian turned the corner Thursday when she took six ounces of diluted fruit juice. By Friday afternoon, she was cooing in her crib beneath an enormous stuffed gorilla.

But her mother looked at her smiling children and saw a reprieve from the illness, not an ending. And her mind drifted to other mothers, in houses across town and at children’s bedsides in area hospitals.

“You just hope it’s not you, or anyone you know,” she said. “But in a small town like this, who don’t you know?”