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Thursday, September 9, 2010 |
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County ready for return of swine flu
Published July 10, 2009
SEGUIN — The day the Obama administration put states on notice they’ll need to find a way to distribute the swine flu vaccine next fall, Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Kinsey had a simple answer Thursday: “We’re ready.”
“If they can provide it, we can do it,” Kinsey said. “We can distribute it to the entire population of the county.”
President Barack Obama made a phone call Thursday to a swine flu “summit” being conducted at the National Institutes of Health to reiterate that when the flu returns next fall, local governments could be expected to play a major role in dealing with whatever challenges it presents.
“We want to make sure we are not promoting panic but we are promoting vigilance and preparation,” Obama said in a conference call with 500 state and local officials.
No final decision has been made on vaccination, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the meeting.
But studies with experimental doses of the new swine flu vaccine are set to start in early August, to see if they’re safe and seem to work. If all goes well, some vaccine could start to roll out in mid-October, she said.
Probably first in line for shots would be school-age children, young adults with risky conditions like asthma, pregnant women and health workers, she added.
“We need your help now to prepare” so those shots actually get to people’s arms, Sebelius told state officials.
Only limited amounts of vaccine will be available at first, but she warned that even a modest vaccination campaign “will involve extraordinary efforts throughout this country.”
Swine flu may have faded from the headlines but it’s still sickening people in the U.S. and especially abroad and is almost certain to worsen when influenza-friendly fall temperatures arrive.
“We must avoid complacency,” Sebelius said.
The government estimates that 1 million Americans so far have been infected with the never-before-seen virus known formally by its scientific family name, H1N1 — and 170 of them have died.
Some of the first of those Americans to demonstrate signs of that infection late last April were Guadalupe County residents.
Two Byron Steele High School students were found to be infected with the H1N1 virus, and Kinsey and Texas Department of State Health Services officials quickly mounted a local response to what soon became known as a pandemic.
Kinsey and other local officials recommended a regimen of hand-sanitizing in public places that is still going on in some local offices and suggested that people avoid large crowds, public kissing, hugging or handshaking and take other measures to slow the spread of the flu where possible.
When it became clear there would be added cases, local authorities closed most schools in Guadalupe and Comal counties — some of them for nearly two weeks. While there were deaths reported in the Texas region, none were reported in this county.
“You never want to be ground zero, but if we’re going to be, you want it to be something simple that turns out to be non-fatal,” Kinsey said. “If half the people getting it were dying, that would be different, but I think we’re ready.”
The mortality rate for swine flu has been so low that Kinsey said it has largely fallen off the radar screens of the national news media, but interest could well return with a new outbreak in the fall.
The recent spring event afforded Kinsey and other local and state planners an opportunity to think of how they’d respond should a dangerous pandemic take place, If it’s just a matter of creating and distributing a second vaccine for an illness with the low mortality rate shown by the April outbreak, Kinsey said the vaccine could be distributed through the public health system and through local pediatricians and general practitioners as it is each year.
“At this point, unless it mutates, I’m not real worried,” Kinsey said. “But every time it transfers from one person to another, there’s always that chance.”
In that case late last month, Kinsey has another scenario for getting the vaccine out.
Kinsey’s office and volunteers with the Guadalupe County Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster recently practiced a “drive-through” scenario for distributing medication dispensed from the Strategic National Stockpile.
In such a public health scenario, officials would have 48 hours to distribute a life-saving medication in a pandemic. The first 12 hours are allocated to getting the medicine to wherever it needs to be distributed, giving local officials 36 hours to distribute it to their populations.
At the Navarro Independent School District campus in Geronimo, Kinsey, sheriff’s deputies and other volunteers practiced getting paperwork filled out and making pretend runs at administering medication to motorists — finding they could serve 300 cars in a little more than two hours, and learning how they’d have to set up such PODs in the case of the real event.
Kinsey said he would approach state public health officials with an idea for doing a test in the fall of the drive-through system — using real flu vaccine, the seasonal one or an H1N1 alternative if one is distributed.
“In some ways, I’d like to try a ‘drive-through’ shot clinic,” Kinsey said. “If they’re interested in it, I’m all for it.”
A key theme to Thursday’s summit: Consider now how your family would handle a disruption even bigger than what happened last spring when the outbreak began. To spur those discussions, HHS will host a contest — at http://www.flu.gov — for the best anti-flu video to turn into a national public service announcement.
Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Kinsey and Guadalupe County Volunteer Coordinator Kay Hays are continuing to look for new business and community partners for the Guadalupe County Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster. Kinsey would like 1,000 VOAD members. If a business, service club or other community group would like to become involved in VOAD, contact Hays at 830-303-9702 or by e-mail at kay.hays(at)co.guadalupe.tx.us .
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