This article appeared in Tampa Bay Times. Read the full story here.
The white van with a Florida Department of Health logo on the side pulls into the Kenwood Inn along 34th Street N in St. Petersburg, and residents begin to peer out from their front doors.
The manager emerges from the front office in shorts and flip-flops, and knocks on every door down the corridor.
“Health department here,” she calls out over the drone of rush-hour traffic.
It’s the third time this year that health officials have come to the inn, which rents rooms by the hour or the month or anything in between. Many of its residents would otherwise be on the streets, said Rachel Ilic, an environmental epidemiologist with the health department. Some have been homeless before.
The health team has come to administer free hepatitis A vaccines, part of an aggressive effort to beat back an outbreak that recently prompted Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees to declare a statewide emergency. The Tampa Bay area has been hit especially hard.
The region has led the state this year with 466 new hepatitis A cases in Pasco County, 369 in Pinellas County and 145 in Hillsborough County.
Pinellas health officials were the first in Florida to deploy “foot teams” into areas where the most at-risk people for hepatitis A tend to gather. They’ve administered 789 vaccines since May. Now, other counties are following suit, including Hillsborough and Pasco.
Since January 2018, Florida has recorded 3,395 cases of hepatitis A, which affects the liver and causes symptoms like fever, dark urine, yellow-tinged skin or eyes, fatigue and gastric issues. The virus is spread through contaminated feces. People pass it along by eating or drinking tainted food or water, or through sex.
Since 2016, outbreaks have hit 29 states, beginning in California and Michigan, Kaiser Health News reports. More than 25,000 cases have been reported nationally in the last year.