MD diagnoses woman’s illness as case of E. coli

The daughter of a woman who became violently ill Wednesday after eating steak purchased Tuesday says the hospital emergency room doctor diagnosed it as a case of E. coli.

The daughter of a woman who became violently ill Wednesday after eating steak purchased Tuesday says the hospital emergency room doctor diagnosed it as a case of E. coli.

Cathy Stannard, the territory’s director of Community Health Programs, said today she is very limited in what she can say for reasons of confidentiality.

Stannard said she could not even confirm whether the communicable disease unit or environmental health officials have even received notice regarding a concern of E. coli.

Jacqueline Shorty told the Star she purchased blade steak from a local store Tuesday.

She and her family and her mother, Emma Shorty, had it for dinner Tuesday night.

By 4 p.m. Wednesday, her mother was vomiting violently, had diarrhea and couldn’t even walk, Shorty said.

She said her 79-year-old mom stayed the night Tuesday, and drove out to her home at the Yukon River Bridge to gather up some things before returning to stay again Wednesday night.

Emma was still at her home and feeling fine at 3:30 p.m. when her son left. But within 15 minutes she had become so ill, so quickly, she called a friend to asked if she drove over could her friend drive her into the Whitehorse General Hospital, Shortly explained.

“My mom called back five minutes later and said, ‘you’ll have to come and get me because I can’t even walk,” another daughter, Elaine Shorty, explained this morning.

Elaine said when they arrived at Whitehorse General Hospital, her mom’s friend put her in a wheelchair and left her inside at the admitting desk while she went and parked.

By the time she returned, hospital staff had already taken her mom into the emergency trauma room, she said.

“Somebody looked at her and somebody said, ‘this woman needs immediate attention.’”

Emma received treatment, and is OK today, but the family is very upset, Elaine said.

“We are incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky my mom was able to get to the hospital and they could treat her right away and do the things they did because we could have lost her,” she said.

Jacqueline Shorty said emergency room staff took blood and urine samples, and samples from the vomit.

Jacqueline said she was in the trauma room with her mom, along with two other professionals from the First Nation health unit, when the attending doctor told them straight-out it was a case of E. coli from the blade steaks.

“He was the doctor, and he was very adamant,” she said. “He said it was a case of E. coli from the meat we bought from the ....”

Elaine said when her mom suddenly became ill, she could not stop throwing up. Her heart rate had jumped to 124 beats a minute, significantly higher than normal.

“They thought she might have been having a heart attack,” Jacqueline said.

E. coli, they were told, can be particularly hard on the elderly and the young, Elaine said.

“We’re lucky her system was able to reject it as quickly as she was able to get it out of her system.”

With no regular beds available at the hospital, she added, Emma would have had to stay the night in the emergency room if she’d decided to stay, but she didn’t want to.

Instead, she spent the night at Jacqueline’s, under the watch of Jacqueline and her family.

Jacqueline said it didn’t have anything to do with the way the meat was cooked, because her mom likes her steaks well done, and it was well done.

She said her partner felt a little ill Tuesday night after dinner, but they didn’t think much of it at the time.

The director of community health programs said the only way to confirm E. coli is through a stool sample sent to an outside lab for analysis.

There are different types of E. coli, Stannard pointed out.

It is the 0157H7 strain that was at the heart of the Canada’s largest recall of beef products last month and earlier this month, she noted.