Hospital treats patients for scabies outbreak

Fayette County's Piedmont Hospital sent more than a dozen employees home and treated almost everyone on the staff to prevent the spread of scabies.

Scabies is a contagious skin rash that can cause intense itching. It is caused by a microscopic mite which burrows into the top layers of skin where it lives, lays eggs and causes itching and a pimple like rash.

The infection was brought into the hospital by a patient during Thanksgiving week.

Channel 2's Diana Davis found out today the hospital treated about 900 employees as a precaution.

Piedmont Fayette said about a dozen of its employees developed scabies symptoms.

"Best we can tell, it came from a patient who came into the emergency room and got admitted to the hospital," Dr. Leigh Hamby of Piedmont Health Care said.

Scabies can spread quickly in crowded conditions where close body and skin contact is frequent. It's common in in places like nursing homes, extended care child care facilities and prisons; and it is treated with a prescription skin cream.

Piedmont Fayette said it aggressively treated not only the hospital employees who had symptoms, but almost everyone on the staff, totaling about 900 people.

"The 900 employees who were treated, was anyone who might come in contact with a patient, patient clothing, patient linen. It was just to make sure there wasn't an outbreak any bigger than the 10 or 12 I think we had," Hamby said.

Hamby said he does not expect any patients to develop symptoms of scabies but in some cases symptoms may take as long as a month to develop.

Anyone with an itchy rash that they have had for several days should be looked at by a physician.

Piedmont Fayette emphasizes not only the infected employees were treated but all those others just to be on the safe side.

To read more about the symptoms of scabies, click here.