Doctors face difficulty telling anthrax from flu

Associated Press

BALTIMORE — A postal worker is sent home from a hospital after doctors tell him he has the flu. The next day he returns and dies of anthrax.

The death Monday of 47-year-old Joseph Curseen has underscored the difficulty — and the life-and-death importance — of distinguishing between the inhaled form of anthrax and the flu, especially with the peak flu season arriving.

The skin form of anthrax causes a distinctive black sore. But the inhaled form has many symptoms that mimic the flu, including fever, headache, general achiness and chest pains.

An important step, doctors say, is checking the patient’s recent history to see if he or she could have been exposed to the disease.

In Curseen’s case, that may have been a fatal omission.

Curseen worked at the Brentwood postal installation in Washington, D.C., which probably processed the anthrax-tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s Capitol Hill office.

But officials at the Southern Maryland Medical Center say Curseen did not tell doctors that he was a postal worker when he first went to the hospital early Sunday after fainting in church the previous day.

"Every indication was that it was stomach flu," hospital spokesman David Clark said. The medical staff, Clark said, was "following all the protocols and procedures they were told to look for."

Now, doctors are asking all patients their occupations, the spokesman said.

As a further precaution, many health officials have urged people to help avoid confusion between flu and anthrax by getting flu shots.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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