Heat, measles, STIs, food poisoning: KC health officials aim to keep World Cup safe
Public health officials in the metro who have spent more than a year-and-a-half preparing to keep thousands of World Cup fans healthy and safe this summer say they are ready.
Their top health concerns for fans: the Kansas City heat, a measles outbreak, cases of food poisoning and sexually transmitted infections, or STIs.
Health departments in nine local counties on the Missouri and Kansas sides — along with city of Kansas City and Independence health departments — have coordinated their World Cup safety messaging.
To stay healthy and prevent making your fellow soccer fans sick, they recommend, stay home if you are ill, wash your hands frequently, stay hydrated in the heat and cough or sneeze into your elbow or a tissue. That is standard public-health advice.
But keeping World Cup fans healthy will be anything but routine. Their worst fear? A public health emergency like a measles outbreak.
If local health department leaders didn’t have each other’s cell phone numbers before, they do now.
“An event like the World Cup is different fundamentally because of the scale,” said Ray Dlugolecki, assistant director of the Jackson County Public Health Department.
“We will have visitors from across the world. We’ll have large crowds, summer heat, we’ll have people moving throughout the entire metro, not just in and around the stadium.
“So from a public health perspective, all of those factors, those considerations, create a mix of issues we need to be monitoring all at the same time.
“And that includes common contagious illnesses that we see here locally, it could be common contagious illnesses that are seen throughout the world that we don’t see much of here.
“And there’s heat-related illness, there’s food safety concerns. And then we always, in public health, have to be aware of anything unusual that might require a quick response. So all of those factors together create this complexity because of the scale of this event.”
Jackson County’s public health department has created a public awareness campaign using the theme of red cards — penalty cards used by soccer referees — to encourage fans to make safe choices while they’re here.
The local health departments published a toolkit of health information for local businesses, organizations and health agencies to share on their own social media platforms, or other ways, during the events.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has also published World Cup health information.
What is (and isn’t) a concern?
A May 1 advisory noted that temperatures over 100 degrees are not uncommon in Missouri during June and July, the timeframe of events in Kansas City, and provided a link to a map of cooling centers across the state and in the metro.
“Considering the time of year that it is, one of our biggest concerns is heat,” said Charlie Hunt, director of the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment.
“We’ve been doing a lot of preparation around prevention of heat-related illness and injury.
“It really comes down to communication and messaging, making sure that people understand the risks of the hot summers here in the Kansas City area ... encourage people to drink plenty of water and to understand what the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke might be.
“We’ve made an intentional effort because we do a lot of this, but there are going to be people who are coming from other parts of the world and they may not be familiar with the unique risks that might be here. So we’re doing our best to make sure people understand that.
“What’s different about it is just the frequency and the different avenues we’re using to get these messages across. For example, we’ve got plans to have signs on some of the buses with some of these messages. That’s not something we normally do.”
Though hantavirus and Ebola have been in international headlines recently — and in national stories suggesting “fear” of Ebola arriving in the United States during World Cup — Kansas City health officials aren’t concerned.
The type of hantavirus that caused an outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship in April is transmitted person-to-person in close quarters, while the hantavirus strain typically seen in Kansas is commonly spread through exposure to infected rodent droppings, Hunt said.
“I think it’s understandable that a lot of people are talking about hantavirus or Ebola and there’s this natural worry that comes with those diseases that have a really high mortality and are just generally terrible diseases,” said Dlugolecki.
“But those illnesses generally require very specific types of exposure. They’re not the kinds of diseases that someone is likely to pick up by sitting near another soccer fan at a match.
“For most fans, the more realistic concerns are things like heat illness, respiratory viruses, stomach bugs, foodborne illnesses. Those are all risks that people can reduce with really simple, practical steps.”
A measles outbreak would be game-changer
A measles outbreak, though, is a real concern.
“Obviously when you have large numbers of people together in close proximity to one another, infectious diseases are a concern,” said Hunt.
“Measles is one of those communicable diseases that we’re concerned about. That’s why we’re stressing the vaccinations so much.”
Hunt and his colleagues encourage fans to make sure they are current on all recommended vaccines, including MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella), flu, COVID-19, Hepatitis A and Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis).
Measles, said Dlugolecki, “have the ability to really create havoc. And that is especially true in areas with low vaccination rates. Thankfully, in most areas of the Kansas City region, our MMR vaccine rates are relatively high.
“But we do have pockets within our region where the vaccination rates are well lower than what they need to be to stave off a large outbreak overall.
“If we have even a single case of measles, it has the ability to move to the highest number of people per case out of almost every disease that we see. One person can spread it to 15 or more people very rapidly.
“So it’s definitely something that we’re monitoring, and we are using wastewater to detect whether there are any signals of the measles virus in Kansas City.
“And based on preliminary results that we’ve been testing for, with regards to a baseline, we have not seen any cases thus far. But it’s something we have to monitor as we scale up the event.”
Responding to a measles outbreak in the size of crowds expected in Kansas City would be challenging.
“If somebody is diagnosed with measles and they’ve been, let’s say, at a watch party somewhere, the challenge is going to be ... there may or not be an easy way to get a hold of everyone that was there,” said Hunt.
“I’ll talk about Johnson County parks and recreation and the watch parties that are being scheduled for Shawnee Mission Park.
“Fortunately they are having people register who want to participate in that. So let’s say somebody is diagnosed with measles and they say they were at Shawnee Mission Park for a watch party during the time they would have been infectious.
“We’ll be able to get a hold of those people that were there and say, ‘Hey ... if you’ve not been vaccinated, here are the signs and symptoms you need to watch for.’
“But for other events that are not going to have people register for them, we’ll have no idea who was there, and who wasn’t. We’ll have to do more public communication and news releases and other mechanisms.
“With measles, there’s a long incubation period, up to three weeks. So by the time people start developing measles from that exposure, we’re going to be at least halfway, or maybe the World Cup events are over, and people have gone back to their own cities and countries. It’s going to be a little hard to track some of that down.
“So let’s hope that that doesn’t all happen.”
Health officials encourage safe sex
Local health officials are also encouraging fans to have safer sex.
History tells them there will be extracurricular sexual activity during World Cup.
Sexually transmitted infections “are like any sort of communicable disease that we might see,” said Dlugolecki.
“... very joyous events where people are coming together from all around the world and interacting and having fun, STIs are no different, they just spread differently.
“So for us, STIs are another thing that we have to monitor as part of this event. And unlike some of the things that might spread during this event, there’s been a lot of evidence based on what’s happened at other World Cups, Olympic events, any time large numbers of people are congregating.
“STIs tend to rise after those events have occurred ... so this is going to be something that we’re monitoring during the tournament. We’ll be asking people to practice safe sex and use precautions, but we’ll also be monitoring after the tournament to encourage people to get tested and to follow up with anything that might be spreading as it pertains to STIs.”
During the World Cup, public health officials can monitor patient complaints and symptoms in local hospital emergency departments, Hunt said, to identify a possible outbreak before it gets out of hand.
“Let’s say it’s a foodborne illness outbreak associated with a watch party somewhere, we’ll want to investigate that quickly and identify the source,” said Hunt. “If there’s a bad food product or there’s a sick food worker that’s continuing to present a risk, we want to make sure we identify that as quickly as possible and mitigate that.
“I don’t want to be overly alarmist, but there are other risks. Johnson County had an intentional food contamination event here (a few years ago) ... we know things can happen. So we’ll be paying very close attention.”
One final ask for World Cup soccer fans
Soccer fans have a responsibility, too, to help keep others safe, Dlugolecki said.
That advice to stay home if you’re sick? He knows that’s a big ask of fans who have paid hundreds and thousands of dollars to come to Kansas City.
“There’s simple things and simple choices that we all make in our day-to-day lives that really kind of demonstrate our care and respect for our fellow human beings, our friends, our family, the people that we work with and live around,” Dlugolecki said.
“So if we had to make a choice of like, ‘Hey, I’m not feeling great, I’m going to go enjoy Fan Fest outdoors, which dramatically cuts my risk of exposing other people,’ these are choices that we can make.
“I understand the financial ramifications that we all live under, right? And especially with how expensive some of these games are. That’s a very real reality ... but we can do simple things that cut risk while still allowing us to do exciting and fun things around this tournament.”
“We want people to have fun,” said Hunt. “But we don’t want them to get sick as a result of it.”
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