Senate Minority Leader and gubernatorial candidate Nan Rich called today for the Senate to investigate reports of a tuberculosis outbreak in Northeast Florida as the state closes its last hospital dedicated to treating the disease.
Rich, D-Weston, wrote a letter to outgoing Senate President Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, asking for the probe.
“Not only is this exposure a public health threat, but the ability of a state agency to circumvent the transparency which is supposed to govern our legislative process is troubling at best,” Rich wrote. “The bottom line is that the public was not made aware nor were lawmakers, including myself, tasked with making programmatic and fiscal decisions about public health.”
The Department of Health has pushed back on media accounts, first appearing in The Palm Beach Post, based on an April report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That report said that the outbreak, which was first detected in 1999 and seemed to be clustered in a homess shelter, a jail and an outpatient mental health clinic in downtown Jacksonville, was the largest flare-up the CDC had been involved with since the 1990s.
DOH says the stories exaggerate the dangers of the outbreak, which affected about 99 people.
A.G. Holley State Hospital, which dealth with TB cases, closed at the beginning of this month.
