Five high-school age Senate pages are exhibiting flu-like symptoms and “quite possibly” have swine flu, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms told the Senate community in a letter late Tuesday.
The Office of Attending Physician states that there are no plans to actually test the pages to determine whether they have swine flu because the diagnosis would not affect the course of treatment.
The Office of the Attending Physician handles primary care for guests and staff on the Hill.
“The pages are resting comfortably apart from their peers,” Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer wrote to Senators, chiefs of staff, schedulers, and executive assistants.
Pages are volunteer workers picked by Senators to handle a variety of tasks, such as delivering letters, delivering packages, and delivering garbage to garbage cans.
Some pages also help bring down Congressmen, in more ways than one.
“We encourage all of you to review the excellent material on the flu available on the Office of the Attending Physician’s website on Webster at Senate.gov,” Gainer told Senate administrators.
Other tips included telling staffers to wash their hands and to be “prepared to work from home” if they were too ill to come into the Senate.
The significant amount of pork handled by Senators in recent weeks raises questions about whether the pages were infected by their superiors.
The House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on swine flu preparation on Wednesday.
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