H1N1 is here
[ NOVEMBER 9, 2009 - KEVIN WEEDMARK ]
The worldwide H1N1 pandemic has reached the Moosomin area, with some cases confirmed in every local community last week. Dozens of students were home from school sick last week, and Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region spokesperson Mark Torjusen said the pandemic flu has spread across rural Saskatchewan.“Confirmed cases do not provide an accurate picture of the situation, because the testing is only done on certain people,” he said. “But I can assure you that H1N1 is out there. It’s across the province. H1N1 is the predominant flu that’s out there. If you’re seeing people home sick with influenza-like symptoms, it’s more than likely H1N1.”
Dr. Michael Plewes, a local physician, said the Moosomin Family Practice Centre and the local doctors’ satellite clinics were inundated with patients for the last two weeks. “The last 12 days have been very busy,” he said. “It started about 12 or 13 days ago. The majority of people coming to see us have flu symptoms. The vast majority probably have H1N1.”
Plewes said the virus is widespread and individual tests are no longer being conducted. “We’ve stopped testing for it now,” he said. “We’ve had positive people in every town. The assumption is that once you’ve got a couple of cases in a town, that’s probably the predominant virus.”
He noted that the disease has spread quickly but has not been as severe as feared. “H1N1 circulated a lot quicker and spread a lot farther than expected,” he said. “Fortunately we have not seen a lot of severe cases. We’ve had one or two people hospitalized, but no one serious enough to be transferred. We’ve been relatively lucky.”
While the H1N1 virus has been circulating and many people have already had it, Plewes said people should still be vaccinated. “It’s still important to get the vaccine,” he said. “This virus will have another bounce again. The more people are immunized, the greater their resistance. If people have already had H1N1, the vaccine gives them some cross-protection against the other strain.” He said he encourages everyone to get the vaccine.
“We see a lot of young people who don’t want to be vaccinated but don’t understand they can become carriers and pass it on to small kids, who could get seriously ill,” he said.
Plewes said the H1N1 flu is leading to a lot of lung problems. “The problem with H1N1 is it tends to have more lung complications following it,” he said, “the bronchitis and so on. A number of years ago, in 1997, there was a flu strain around that would hit people, and a few hours later they would get pneumonia. They suddenly couldn’t get their air, and there were a lot of deaths from it within two days. That’s what they were worried about with this flu but it’s not happening. There is no sudden pneumonia. That problem hasn’t materialized as of yet. The next go round it may materialize, next April or next September.”
“We’re just lucky. If it was as bad as they thought it would be, it could have overwhelmed the system. But it’s turned out to be fairly mild. Most people are sick for three or four days and then better.”
The good news is that, after two busy weeks, local doctors say that the crush of people going to the walk-in clinic was subsiding. Dr. Ross Kerkhoff said Friday that the number of people coming in with flu symptoms was going down later in the week. “It’s starting to go down now. I think we’ve probably got a few more weeks of this wave, and we expect another wave here in January,” he said.
Immunization is starting this week in the RQHR for schoolage children up to Grade 6, a change in plans Torjusen says is due to the lack of adequate vaccine to accommodate the other high-risk groups that were to have been vaccinated first. “First we were to get 100,000 doses this week, then it was 60,000, and now we’re getting only 14,000 doses,” Torjeson said.
“That’s significantly curtailed the ability to do the larger risk group. With school age children, those under the age of 10 receive half a dose of vaccine. We will know later this week if they will need a second half dose later on.”
The province’s chief medical health officer says the science supports moving schoolage children up the priority list. “The science is showing us since H1N1 appeared in the spring that this age group is at a higher risk for illness and hospitalization,” Chief Medical Health Officer Moira McKinnon said. “We will continue to expand vaccinations to targeted high-risk groups as the vaccine becomes available.”
To date, health care workers, people in remote and isolated communities, children from six months to under five years of age, pregnant women and women post-partum up to four weeks remain eligible to receive the vaccine.
“I want to stress that these people are all still eligible to receive the vaccine if for whatever reason they missed it last week,” McKinnon said.
“We are not leaving one risk group for another, just expanding the pool of those eligible to receive it. And as the vaccine becomes available, we will move it as quickly and safely as possible to high risk groups.”