Outbreak on the Border

Health authorities at a Navy base in Southern California took steps last weekend to curtail an outbreak of pneumonia and swine flu among illegal immigrant children housed at the facility, according to U.S. officials. The outbreak of disease among several of the nearly 600 immigrant children at the Naval Base Ventura County, located north of Los Angeles, initially was thought to be caused by deadly bacterial streptococcal meningitis, according to one official close to the issue. However, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said he was not aware of any cases of meningitis at the base. The pneumonia cases and meningitis scare last weekend followed two cases of H1N1 swine flu among other child immigrants—one at the California base and another in Texas. The virus caused a global pandemic in 2009, but officials said it is considered less dangerous than the meningitis outbreak that began over the past weekend. Naval officials, along with HHS and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officials, sought to block the disease outbreak by quarantines and halting transfers of children into and out of the facility. Several of the children developed symptoms that included fever and were at first thought to be meningitis. The swine flu case, discovered late last week, involved a 16-year-old Salvadoran boy who, like others at the facility, had been transferred recently from Nogales, Ariz. The sick children were moved to local hospitals where they are being treated. HHS spokesman Kenneth J. Wolfe said reports of respiratory illness at the naval base involved minors who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and who had been relocated...more