Hospitals battle to cope with poisoning

• Food poisoning on the rise

The number of suspected salmonella cases has reached 100, in the largest outbreak of its kind ever seen in the ACT.

It forced the Canberra and Calvary hospitals to activate their emergency response protocols on Tuesday evening, but by Wednesday afternoon, that had been cancelled as the number of people presenting at the emergency departments finally began falling.

Fifteen people had been hospitalised by Wednesday evening, with many more having been observed in emergency departments.

The outbreak was confined to people who ate at the newly opened Copa Brazilian Churrasco in Dickson on Saturday and Sunday.

“We’re really struggling ... to find someone that wasn’t sick – almost everyone who ate at the restaurant did get sick, which is unusual,” ACT chief health officer Paul Kelly said.

“Not only have people been quite severely ill, they’ve been ill quite quickly, more quickly than we would normally experience from a salmonella outbreak.”

Environmental health and communicable disease teams continued to work with the chefs and proprietor of the buffet-style restaurant on Wednesday, trying to pin down the source of the bacteria outbreak, which Dr Kelly said appears to have affected people in large doses.

“When we normally do these type of outbreak investigations, it becomes clear fairly early on that it’s a particular food that’s the problem and we can deal with that. This is a bit more complex because there’s a whole range of meats and salads and sauces and it seems almost everyone ate everything,” he said.

“We’re working very closely with the restaurant to look at their processes and see exactly what they’ve been doing, how they’ve prepared their food. Is it a cross-contamination issue, for example, is it use of eggs? These are the sort of things we’ve seen in previous outbreaks.”

Dr Kelly believes they will have more answers by Thursday, with results from laboratory testing due.

A separate, unrelated outbreak of gastroenteritis from a south-side restaurant on Mother’s Day has affected more than 60 people.

“No organism has been identified for the second outbreak. None of the cases associated with the second outbreak have been hospitalised,” Dr Kelly said.

“It’s another gastroenteritis type illness, so vomiting and diarrhoea, but nowhere near the severity of this salmonella outbreak.

“Not everyone ate the food that we think is probably responsible, but we’re just in a preliminary stage of that investigation and that venue is also closed.

“We started that investigation on Monday, but frankly it’s been a bit swamped by the other issues we’ve been dealing with.”

The salmonella outbreak put huge stress on the hospitals, forcing ACT Health to enact its emergency response plan to take logistical problems away from the frontline.

The plan, which had been put in place for winter in case of an influenza outbreak, saw increased staffing levels, as well as hospital liaison officers, an ambulance representative and communications team gather in a nerve centre to co-ordinate efforts to increase capacity in the hospitals.

On Wednesday, the hospitals were taking only life-threatening transfers from southern NSW, but elective surgery had been able to continue.

Dr Kelly advised people feeling sick to speak to their GPs first and only report to hospital emergency departments if they felt they were experiencing a medical emergency.