The situation with meningococcal infection among employees of the Ozon warehouse in Yekaterinburg is developing rapidly. Of the seven patients, two have already died. It can be assumed that the causative agent of the infection is highly virulent – capable of causing a severe course. It scares.
And, of course, those who order goods from this company are primarily afraid. There are a lot of such people, and many people think: will an infected purchase fly to them. There are versions that meningococcus also got to the company’s warehouse in the same way with the package – allegedly someone did it intentionally.
A person can only become infected from a person
“Meningococcus is not anthrax, you can’t get it through a parcel,” explains aif.ru infectious diseases doctor, professor, doctor of medical sciences, head of the department of infectious diseases and epidemiology of the Russian National Research Medical University. N. I. Pirogov Vladimir Nikiforov. – Infection occurs only by airborne droplets from person to person. Moreover, in order to get infected, you need to be located next to the patient, literally very close to him. And then, coughing and sneezing, he transmits his bacteria to others. But through things it will never happen. Moreover, meningococcus is an extremely unstable microorganism. In the environment, it dies very quickly.”
Closed team disease
“Therefore, there have never been epidemics of meningococcal infection,” the professor continues. – There are only individual patients or small outbreaks, as now in Yekaterinburg. They arise in schools, kindergartens, orphanages and nursing homes, in army barracks – this is a disease of closed teams where people communicate closely with each other. To prevent this from happening, you need to do preventive vaccinations. For example, this is how they do it in the army. There is also an emergency vaccination, it is carried out if the first patients have already appeared in the team.”
By the way, this is exactly what they are doing now at the warehouse in Yekaterinburg. According to official information, 60 people have already been vaccinated there. Where did the patients get infected? It is possible that this happened at work if they had close contacts with each other. Here and there information about the hostel appears, perhaps some of the patients lived there together and became infected from each other. But exact data on this is not reported.
Source: aif.ru
