After contracting flesh-eating disease, patients question Nova Scotia Health's response

Two women in southwestern Nova Scotia are questioning the response by Public Health after they say invasive group A strep infections left them in hospital fighting flesh-eating disease. 

The episode raises questions about public health messaging in the age of social media, according to one expert.

Kelly Doucet, who lives in Hebron, N.S., said she thought she had the flu when her ordeal began last month. But she said her mother encouraged her to go to Yarmouth Regional Hospital after hearing about a couple in the area who died as a result of invasive group A strep.

"I knew that it was in the province," she said. "I wasn't really aware of the symptoms, signs or severity of what it was."

Doucet said she needed surgery to treat flesh-eating disease as a result of the Strep A infection. And while the Yarmouth hospital team was excellent, she said, Public Health's response has been a disappointment.

"I got more information off of the internet than when [Public Health was] calling me in my hospital bed," she said.

Her grandson, who had stayed with Doucet in the days prior to her illness, was treated with a preventive antibiotic by Public Health, she said. But her daughter, who is the boy's mother and did not stay with Doucet, received no antibiotics and wound up in hospital with what she believes was a complication from a strep infection.

"When I was laying in my bed [after] being cut open, my daughter was going to the outpatients," Doucet said. "That was the worst 24 hours of my life."

Crystal Dillon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.S., said her household wasn't contacted after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with flesh-eating disease as a result of an invasive group A strep infection. 

She said there was a long wait when she visited the Yarmouth Regional Hospital on April 8 because the emergency departments in Shelburne and Digby were closed at that time.

"After seven hours, I left. I couldn't sit anymore," said Dillon, who returned to the hospital two days later, at which point she received surgery. 

There should have also been more information communicated about invasive strep infections in the community, she said.

"People should have at least been given information so that it wasn't scary for them to hear that I had this." 

An anonymous Facebook message, purportedly written by a nurse, was posted more than a week after Doucet and Dillon arrived in hospital. It claimed there were five active cases of flesh-eating disease at the hospital. And it was shared by thousands of users.