Senate Pages May Have Swine Flu
EmailABC News' Z. Byron Wolf reports: 5 high school students who work in the Senate as pages have flu-like symptoms that the attending physician believes are "most likely" influenza and "quite possibly" the swine flu.
These are the blue blazered boys and girls that attend to senators on the floor – bring them water and papers and podiums – while taking classes on Capitol Hill for a year or, in this case, the summer.
Pages come in close contact with senators on a daily basis.
Senate staffers disputed that the pages affected with symptoms have been quarantined, but this seems to be a question of semantics as they pages are said by Terrance Gainer, the Senate Sergeant at Arms to be "resting comfortably apart from their peers."
The attending physician in the Senate is not recommending any special precautions for people on the Hill.
We will never know for sure if this is the swine flu as the students aren't going to be tested for it specifically "since the test itself is uncomfortable and the results of the test will not
alter the treatment plan," according to Gainer.
The below message was sent tonight to senators and staffers.
A MESSAGE FROM TERRANCE W. GAINER, SENATE SERGEANT AT ARMS
This message was sent to Senators, Chiefs of Staff, Administrative Managers, Schedulers and Executive Assistants:
I am writing to let the Senate community know that the Senate Page Program is reporting that five of our summer pages are exhibiting flu-like symptoms — slightly elevated temperature, cough, and sore throats and the Office of Attending Physician believes that they most likely have influenza, quite possibly the H1N1 virus.
The Office of Attending Physician (and the vast majority of outside doctors) are not testing for the virus right now since the test itself is uncomfortable and the results of the test will not alter the treatment plan. The pages are resting comfortably apart from their peers and will not be allowed to return to work until cleared by the Physician¹s Office.
While it is not unusual for several pages in a class of 50 to be ill at any given time, we are aware that the flu is of particular concern to our community right now.
The Office of the Attending Physician is closely monitoring the situation and does not believe that further actions on the part of the Senate Community are necessary at this time. If that changes, we will let
you know. This is a good time, however, to remind all of you that flu season, and the expected stronger return of the H1N1 virus, is coming, particularly as colleges and schools resume in the fall. We ask all of you to continue to take precautions, including frequent hand washing and sanitizing, staying home if you feel ill, and ensuring that you and your colleagues are prepared to work from home if a pandemic flu strikes this area.
We encourage all of you to review the excellent material on the flu available on the Office of the Attending Physician's website on Webster at Senate.gov.
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At least they won’t have Marc Foley
sending them “get well” cards. But
I wouldn’t mind a few of them coughing
on Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Dodd….
………………
Posted by: Trajan | July 29, 2009, 12:00 am 12:00 am
I doubt that the swine flu would bother those idiots in the Senate. They already got the pork barrel flu.
Posted by: savage24 | July 29, 2009, 9:16 am 9:16 am
Ha, that is hilarious. All that pork floating around in Washington, it was bound to happen. I bet the swine flu originated right in DC. The Pages shold sue the congress for double gross negligence. Sooo funny, best article of the week.
Posted by: vinniegoomba | July 29, 2009, 9:29 am 9:29 am
Why are they being tested? I thought the CDC stopped testing. I know they stopped counting dead bodies. The swine flu has been handled about as well as immigration. Our governement doesn’t give a rip about you and me, but now we can’t unleash swine flu on capiton hill. Hell no.
Posted by: Tom Penn | July 29, 2009, 9:41 am 9:41 am
I said here on ABC from the very beginning that this swine flu was not a joking matter. It is different from the common flu and it is potentially very deadly because it kills the young and the healthy. Regardless of facts, there are so many stupid and uneducated Americans (probably the Obama supporters) who kept saying that this is an overblown issue and their argument is that every year, there are thousands of people who die of the common flu and the swine flu has so far only killed hundreds. DON’T BE STUPID! The common flu did not kill thousands of people. The people who died with the common flu were actually the old and the sick people who had some other complications and therefore they actually died of some other diseases. Secondly, we still haven’t seen the full-blown effect of the swine flu yet. As the experts pointed out in this article, if nothing is done, 40% of the Americans will eventually get infected and hundreds of thousands will eventually die. I think that in the worse-case scenario, we might end up with a pandemic crisis like the one that happened in 1918 when millions of people got killed. TO SUM THIS UP IN ONE SENTENCE, YOUR STUPID PRESIDENT HAS DONE A STUPID THING TO GET US INTO THIS CRISIS. He should have shut down the US-Mexico border from the very beginning to quell the spread of the H1N1 virus and quarantined those people who travelled to Mexico when they returned to the US. Instead, the guy just sat on his butts and watch the things to get worse and finally develop into a full-blown crisis. I remember the first thing the guy said when he came on TV during prime time to talk about the swine flu was that he was prepared to spend a lot of money on it. It looks like you have a president who is pretty good at spending money but not at solving the problems. Look at his trillion-dollars stimulus package. Are we seeing any result yet? How can we trust this guy to fix the very complex health care system?
Posted by: DelegateMath | July 29, 2009, 10:30 am 10:30 am
Why? There is no better way to get term limitation for these jokers (synonym for Al Franken).
Posted by: jkb | July 29, 2009, 10:42 am 10:42 am
on the T E D web site there two excellent videos. enter ” pandemic ” – one tells about 1918. back then the flu went around the world 3 times – the first time was relatively mild ( like now ) the second and third were massively deadly. hang on to your hats.
Posted by: dirk alan | July 29, 2009, 11:27 am 11:27 am
Can’t “The One” read something on his teleprompter to stop the flu from spreading?
Of course, the appropriate number of “journalists” would prostrate themselves before Him.
Posted by: Rupert | July 29, 2009, 4:50 pm 4:50 pm
Hopefully the vermin in the senate have been in close contact with the pages!
Posted by: LawyerScum | July 29, 2009, 6:23 pm 6:23 pm