Parents'
meningitis fears addressed
HEALTH:
County expert says the bacterial disease isn't highly
contagious.
September 25,
1998
By LIZ KOWALCZYK
and DEBRA GORDON
The Orange County Register
CYPRESS — About 200 concerned parents,
used to a world in which antibiotics and vaccines prevent and cure most
childhood illnesses, crowded into the auditorium at Lexington Junior High
School on Thursday night to ask why.
Why did 13-year-old Ashley Williams, a Lexington eighth-grader,
die Wednesday just hours after she began exhibiting symptoms of deadly
meningococcal meningitis? How do we know it won't happen again? To our
kids? Our families?
Dr. Hildy Meyers, director of communicable diseases and
epidemiology for the county Health Care Agency, tried to soothe the frightened
crowd, reiterating that Ashley had a particularly virulent strain of the
bacteria, but that the infection is not contracted through casual, indirect
contact.
Most people who are directly exposed to a sick person's
saliva don't get sick, she said.
"If I had the disease and I coughed, you would be
in no danger from me," she said, speaking from a point about 3 feet
from the first row of parents.
About 15 to 20 people who had close contact with Williams
have been put on preventive antibiotics.
Thursday, three psychologists and two school counselors
set up shop in the school's media center, providing group and individual
counseling to about 80 children, said Principal Lee Kellogg.
Eighth-grader Jessica Martinez, a close friend of Ashley's,
attended Thursday night's meeting with her mother. Jessica brought a handwritten
poem that Ashley had given her during summer school, signed with a heart
and a teddy bear.
"She was really hyper and happy," she said,
describing her friend. "She never liked to see people down."
Earlier in the evening, Ashley's mother, Lisa Roberts,
talked about her daughter from her Long Beach home. Ashley, she said, had
been fine all weekend.
She spent Saturday and Sunday playing with her cousins
in Long Beach.
She moved in with her father, Jerome Williams, in Anaheim
two years ago to attend junior high school there.
She had a low fever Monday, but it broke after she took
Tylenol. On Tuesday, she got worse and her fever spiked to 104 degrees.
The fever broke again, but later that evening, her uncle, Ernest Williams,
told the audience at Lexington, Ashley became delirious.. On the way to
the hospital, he said, her father noticed a rash spreading across her body
— a telltale symptom of bacterial meningitis.
She was transferred from Western Medical Center Hospital
Anaheim to UCI Medical Center in Orange, where she died at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Services
will be held at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at 1500 E. San Antonio Drive, Long
Beach.