H1N1 Flu Blog Updates at Washington State University

Follow  how Washington  State University is dealing with their H1N1 Swine flu outbreak.

Every morning at HWS, a small group of us gather to review the previous day’s flu related activities on campus. We talk daily with campus leaders to monitor the situation and to determine what steps need to be taken next. It is clear from our conversations that many of you want more info, and you want it faster and clearer. This blog is our effort to provide you with that information as quickly and as accurately as possible. To begin, we’ve pasted some of the simple answers to questions we believe to be important.

Follow their blog about the Swine Flu

Elmo Good Habits PSA with Sec Sebelius
From: USGOVHHS | 11,828 views
Elmo spreads good habits! Secretary Sebelius and Elmo encouraged kids to practice good habits like hand washing to stay healthy and happy.

Elmo teaches good handwashing

From the Wall Street Journal

By Jacob Goldstein

Here’s a quick roundup of swine (H1N1) flu news:

The feds put out guidelines today to help businesses prepare for a possible second wave of the H1N1 virus, which could come around this fall. Nothing particularly surprising here; mainly, be sure that sick employees don’t come to work, and have a plan in place in case things get really bad. One interesting detail: During a severe wave of flu, one option for healthy employees who can’t work from home is to come to the office and try not to come within six feet of another person. “This is not a simple or easy strategy,” the CDC notes dryly.

The public isn’t too worked up about swine flu, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News. More than 60% of respondents said they’re “not at all” or “not too” worried about the pandemic. Nearly three quarters said they believe that the government can respond effectively to an outbreak. And 65% said they’d get a swine flu vaccine for themselves or a family member if it were recommended by a doctor.

What’s the deal with the swine flu vaccine, anyway? As this useful WSJ swine flu primer noted yesterday, the feds are now predicting they will have 45 million doses of the vaccine by mid-October, with another 20 million doses a week coming off the assembly line after that, and a total of 195 million doses by December. Clinical trials now underway should make it clear whether two doses per person will be required to generate immunity. Orders from governments in the developed world now stand at over 1 billion doses, Agence France Presse reported yesterday.

Image of H1N1 swine flu by C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish via CDC

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Cabin FeverTrying to stop the spread of swine flu at summer camp.
By Marc SiegelPosted Friday, July 10, 2009, at 9:27 AM ET
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Can swine flu be contained at summer camps? Click image to expand.Can swine flu be contained at summer camps?For three summers, my 12-year-old son, Joshua, has attended Camp Modin, a beautiful camp in rural Maine. This year, when we dropped him off at the northbound bus, something was different: The counselors were taking children’s temperatures before letting them onboard. It seemed a wise precaution, as the new influenza A H1N1 swine flu strain continues to spread and the weather in Maine in June was cool this year, which would facilitate an outbreak of the virus. But as a physician who has studied the flu for many years, I was still worried. An infected person can be contagious even if he doesn’t have a fever.

My concern was justified. Three days after camp started, I called the camp director, Howard Salzburg, and discovered that he was beside himself. One of the parents, another physician, had used Tylenol to deliberately suppress his child’s fever so he wouldn’t be held back. There were already 16 cases of the flu, confirmed by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to be the H1N1 swine flu strain. Desperate to contain the infection, Howard had created a quarantine bunk for the sick and was having all the bunks cleaned with hospital-grade disinfectant. One other tool could help stem the spread of infection—but using it would go against CDC protocol.
Related in Slate
Christopher Beam answered the questions you probably had about swine flu. Michelle Tsai explained why we don’t have a comprehensive flu vaccine—it would be dangerous!—and Jon Cohen cautioned that surgical masks probably won’t save you either. Emily Bazelon asked why we’re sending tiny children to sleep-away camp anyway.

The Centers for Disease Control has a national policy to reserve the anti-flu drug Tamiflu, which works by blocking the flu virus from detaching from one human cell and spreading to the next one, for only severe cases. But with the new pandemic strain circling the globe and more than 1 million people already infected, it seemed to me it was time for our public health authorities to employ a more aggressive strategy. Clinical trials have shown that Tamiflu, when taken within 48 hours of exposure, is 92 percent effective at preventing flu in adults and 82 percent effective in children. Since we don’t yet have a vaccine, it was clear that the best strategy was to use the drug, which decreases the severity and the duration of the illness and helps prevent people who are in contact with flu patients from getting sick themselves. I e-mailed the camp parents to let them know that Tamiflu is well-tolerated and safe and that I was starting my son on a 10-day course of it; it would be wise, I recommended, for them to do the same. Prescriptions were soon flooding the camp’s fax machine; out of the 350 campers, 250 campers were started on the drug, as were more than 100 staffers.