Houston hospitals see surge in skin infections in Harvey’s wake

Enlarge / Montgomery County Hospital District responds to a 911 call in a flooded neighborhood during Hurricane Harvey. (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

As contaminated flood waters recede in the Houston area, patients with skin infections are spilling into local hospitals and clinics, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Over the holiday weekend, doctors saw significant-but not overwhelming-upticks in soggy skin wounds and infections, as well as other ailments linked to Hurricane Harvey clean-up and recovery efforts. Those included respiratory problems, such as mold allergies and pneumonia cases, issues with drug withdrawals in those who lost access to medications during the disaster, and other injuries that include those from electrical shocks.

Dr. James McCarthy, chief of emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann Hospital's Red Duke Trauma Institute, south of Houston's Midtown, told the Chronicle that the natural disaster altered the very nature of holiday medicine. "Harvey changed the composition of our Labor Day weekend census from the typical overload of trauma cases from traffic accidents to a lot of soft-tissue infections," he said.

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