CDC Starts Difficult Task of Recording Hurricane's Effects

"No, we haven't seen any, but I hear East Jefferson had one," she said, referring to a nearby hospital.

"I talked to them and they said it was actually Vibrio alginolyticus . That's something different, although it's probably salt water-related, too," Clark said.

Ochsner Hospital survived the storm and was not flooded. Lab technicians had to aim fans on their microbiology and chemistry analyzers to keep them cool enough to operate during the days the hospital was running on auxiliary power. For Clark's records, Eppling called up the hospital's computerized database and printed out the blood culture results since Aug. 28 -- the day before Katrina struck.

Dressed in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, cargo shorts and three days of beard, Clark was on his third stop of the day. He was part of a CDC effort to put in place a mechanism to capture the current and future health status of the Katrina victims who didn't evacuate.

The agency hopes the area's working hospitals -- fewer than a half-dozen out of nearly 20 -- will use a one-page questionnaire to gather basic information on everyone who comes to the emergency room or is admitted.

"The trick is to come up with some data that are scientifically useful that other people can read and say, 'If this happens here, this is what we can anticipate,' " he said.

CDC epidemiologists will collect the data from the hospitals, analyze it once a week, and provide reports to the state and city health departments and the hospitals themselves. They will also go back and extract information from ER records to learn the pattern of illness and injury the event wrought, at least in those who made it to hospitals that were still functioning.

A study of similar data on the effects of flooding in Missouri in 1993, which displaced 60,000 people, found the flood-related problems equally split between injuries -- most commonly sprains and lacerations -- and illnesses, primarily intestinal and skin problems. After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, a survey of 20 North Carolina hospitals found that skin problems, dog bites and the interruption of basic medical needs (such as dialysis and supplementary oxygen) were the immediate problems, followed by insect bites, diarrhea and asthma triggered by mold.

Neither study turned up any outbreak of contagious disease.

Katrina may be somewhat different. Norovirus, which causes a nonfatal intestinal illness, has been diagnosed in numerous evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, officials said.

What is almost certainly lost to scientific analysis is information about the spectrum of illnesses treated by emergency medical teams in the giant staging areas here and in Baton Rouge as large numbers of the city's poorest, sickest and least mobile citizens were removed en masse.

"We were lucky to generate a chart on them of any type. We were lucky to record a name. The paper work from the first few days was poor at best," said Erik Larsen, 54, an emergency medicine physician from White Plains, N.Y., who helped lead the field hospital at Louis Armstrong International Airport.