What one little chicken pox virus can cause
What one little chicken pox virus can cause
Monday, 9 March 2009
Following through the consequences of last weekend’s Management Committee decision that students without antibodies to chicken pox should not participate in Project Week has taken the bulk of my time this week. We only had one student with chicken pox, but in Hong Kong’s post-SARS state of hyper-awareness of disease, it was sufficient to kick-start a massive response.
The background to the situation was that one of our students was diagnosed with chicken pox and isolated in the sick bay from 21st February. Chicken pox has an incubation (infectious) period of up to 3 weeks, and as Project Week was due to start on 7th March, which was within the incubation period, we had a problem. What would we do if a student came down with symptoms of chicken pox in an isolated part of the Philippines, or Cambodia, or Vietnam, or China, or any of the other destinations? Would it be responsible for us to send potentially contagious students into a plane with a couple of hundred other passengers? Could we send potentially contagious students into isolated areas where local people may not have been exposed to chicken pox, or into hospitals and orphanages where people might have lowered immunity?
Because of the potential financial implications of having to fly sick students back to Hong Kong mid-way through Project Week, the matter was brought to the attention of the Management Committee of the Board last Saturday, and attending that meeting was one of the reasons I returned early from the UWC meetings in Swaziland.
The Management Committee had acted most properly and obtained medical advice. This advice suggested that the College would be irresponsible if it allowed infectious, or potentially infectious, students to travel during Project Week, both because of the health risks to the individual and the group, and also because of the risk of infection to local people in the areas being visited.
One of the options was to cancel Project Week for this year, but I was very pleased and relieved that this option was not adopted. Nonetheless, as a United World College, it was clear that we had an obligation to act responsibly. Therefore, the agreed solution was this:
a.Students who had access to their doctor, and could get their doctor to fax a certificate verifying they had had chicken pox or that they had been vaccinated against chicken pox were able to go on Project Week as planned.
b. For students who could not obtain this certificate, the College covered the cost of a blood test which could tell if they had chicken pox antibodies. It was quite a scene last Monday afternoon as about a hundred students lined up for the blood test. The results of the blood test took three days to arrive, so we found out the results on Thursday afternoon.
c. For students whose blood test showed that they had had chicken pox (i.e. they had the antibodies), it meant they were not infected, they could not be a carrier, and therefore they were able to go on Project Week as planned.
d. For students whose blood test showed that they had not had chicken pox (i.e. there were no antibodies), it meant that they could be infected or they could be a carrier. Because the period had already passed where it would have been possible to have a vaccination against an infection already obtained, those students were not be able to go on Project Week as planned, and had to stay at College and do a Hong Kong-based service project instead.
e. Students who were not able to produce a satisfactory certificate from their doctor and who refused to do the blood test also were not be able to go on Project Week as planned, and they also had to stay at College and do a Hong Kong-based service project.
When I first announced these measures, the initial reaction was that they seemed somewhat drastic. However, after explanation and mature reflection, I think everyone realised that the medical advice was strong, and that we had to take these precautions to avoid infecting local people in our various destinations, as well as minimising the risk that our own students might need to be hospitalised overseas (as most airlines refuse to carry sick or infectious passengers).
The next challenge was handling the financial rearrangements required. Because many of our Project Week groups had arranged cheap flights, it was sometimes difficult to recover costs for flights that had already been paid. As a gesture of sharing the social responsibility, the College paid students 50% of the non-refundable component of air fares that had been pre-paid.
Fortunately, in the end, fewer than 30 students were unable to go away on Project Week because of the chicken pox situation. I am therefore sharing a considerably quieter campus this week than I was expecting just half a week ago.