County to Settle Suit by Disabled Workers

Orange County has agreed to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of disabled people who were temporarily removed from their jobs after an outbreak of hepatitis A last year.

Under the agreement, county officials promised to train their health-care staff about developmental disabilities and to write letters to some employers who refuse to hire disabled people.

The class-action lawsuit filed by advocates for disabled workers challenged the county Health Care Agency’s work restrictions that went into effect after the hepatitis outbreak in March 1995.

Those restrictions prohibited about 300 disabled people from working at their jobs in certain fields, including food handling and child care, until they proved immunity to hepatitis A through a blood test. The order came after 17 developmentally disabled people contracted hepatitis A, a virus that can be spread through contaminated food or physical contact.

The county, which denied the discrimination allegations, rescinded the work restrictions five months later, but Protection & Advocacy Inc., a Sacramento group, alleged that they had unfairly targeted the disabled.

In court Friday, Eric Gelber, a lawyer for the disabled, said his clients decided to drop their demands for damages in return for assurances by the county.

Under the agreement, the county agreed to review its policies on communicable diseases. The county’s Health Care Agency also will hold four-hour training seminars on issues involving people with developmental disabilities.

The settlement noted that an unintended effect of the work restriction orders “is that some employers have, apparently, refused to continue to employ people with developmental disabilities.”

The county plans to write letters to these employers “to underscore that the Health Care Agency, by its investigation and issuance of work restriction orders, did not intend to suggest that developmentally disabled workers as a group present an unacceptable risk as workers,” according to the settlement.