Background: A large outbreak of measles has spread across Italy over the year 2017. Its impact on emergency department (ED) of a tertiary-care teaching hospital and the related critical issues in public health were evaluated.
Methods: Medical records of adults discharged from January to December 2017 with diagnosis of 'measles' or 'measles suspicion' were collected and analyzed.
Results: From a total of 58 579 admissions, 218 medical records matched enrollment criteria. Measles infection was confirmed in 55.3% of patients, excluded in 26.2%, and judged as possible or probable in 18.3% of cases. Considered that the vaccination status was unknown in 89.2% of patients, the mean time spent in temporary isolation rooms (TIRs) waiting serological results was 1.7 ± 0.8 days. Measles-free patients spent a mean of 1.9 ± 0.9 days in TIRs, meaning a cumulative unnecessary time of isolation of 106.4 days. Despite most of patients were pauci-simptomatic and with a low burden of comorbidities, only 28.6% of them reported a previous out-of-hospital medical contact. Moreover an assessment of moderately critical conditions was assigned to 89.6% of cases, representing an over-valuation of the severity of the cases. Antibiotic therapy had been prescribed in 69.0% of cases and 57.7% of patients were hospitalized. We found no differences in terms of median time spent in TIRs, rate of hospitalization and antibiotic prescription between measles cases and measles-free patients.
Conclusion: A preventable high-infective disease outbreak can lead to a misapply of ED facilities in terms of unjustified admissions, time spent in TIRs, antibiotic prescription and in hospitalization rate.
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association. All rights reserved.