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Commissioners Told County Not Ready for Pandemic Flu ; Health Officials: Staff, Funds Strain to Keep Up

Posted on: Friday, 16 December 2005, 15:00 CST

By THOMAS RYLL, Columbian staff writer

Clark County commissioners were told Wednesday that the county's public health system is only 20 percent along in preparations for a pandemic flu. On the other hand, officials were quick to point out, there is no pandemic. Yet.

Historical precedent, including the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated 40 million people, has health officials worldwide worried about the possibility of avian flu or other influenza becoming even more destructive at a time when sickness can be spread in a matter of days from continent to continent.

At Wednesday's session, John Wiesman, director of the county health department, and other employees outlined the steps they are taking to make ready for a time that may, or may not, come.

Coincidentally, the work session was on the same day that U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver, staged a media briefing in Washington, D.C., on the bleak status of the preparations nationwide for a flu pandemic. In a press release, Baird said the Bush administration's $7.1 billion plan calls for stockpiling enough vaccine for 20 million people which won't happen until 2009. By 2010, the goal is to expand the emergency "surge capacity" of manufacturers in order to have the ability to produce vaccine for all Americans nearly 300 million doses within six months of the onset of a pandemic.

Baird, a member of the House Science Committee, appeared with ranking member Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat. "I cannot stress this enough: Should a highly lethal form of the flu surface in the next few years the biological sciences vaccines and other medicines will not save us," Gordon said.

That was the same message delivered to the commissioners here. The avian flu cases that have spread from birds to humans in Southeast Asia have proven almost untreatable, with a mortality rate of 50 percent. (The virus has not mutated to be able to spread from human to human, the development feared most by scientists.)

Commissioners were told that hospitals in the best of times have little additional capacity for the victims of any sort of disaster. And given the ineffectiveness of treatment at this point, hospitalization may be of little use. "We live in a society that sees every disease as treatable," said Rich Conrad, a health department employee working on the emergency response plan. "When we ask people who have a very sick person to stay at home because there is not much we can do at a hospital, we don't know how that will play out."

Wiesman said that a series of briefings and planning meetings, including city officials, emergency workers, hospital administrators and others, will be held through summer 2006. They will culminate in late summer or early fall with a "pandemic tabletop," a sort of disaster drill in an office, where officials are presented with a flu scenario and challenged to make decisions. In late 2006, preparedness plans will be set in motion.

By law, the commissioners are empowered to declare an emergency, authorize control measures such as the closure of public places and businesses, and maintain essential governmental services.

Emergency preparations for earthquakes and the like are one thing, but influenza is unfamiliar, if not unpleasant, terrain for the commissioners. Commissioner Betty Sue Morris described the discussion as "grueling" at one point. Later she said, "I have to say this is not one of the challenges I expected to have" in the job.

Wiesman took the opportunity to ask for more resources. He called a pandemic flu, if not the preparations themselves, "A challenge to the crumbling public health system" nationwide.

Wiesman said his department has had to find staff time to deal with a growing number of problems, including school viruses, hepatitis and this week's E. coli infections, caused by infected unpasteurized milk, that have sickened several children. Those are the same employees who must help with influenza preparations. "We need to figure out a way to fund a prevention staff," he said.

Even though their comments alone could cause observers to start feeling the onset of a fatal disease, all of the health department workers stressed that there is no need to panic. Dr. Justin Denny, county health officer, and Conrad said after the work session that the same general household preparedness measures recommended for everything from bad winter storms to building-flattening earthquakes are prudent for a flu gone out of control: extra food, prescription medicines and other supplies. The theory in the event of flu is that those supplies would help minimize the human contact ("social distancing" in the words of public health workers) that spreads the disease.

"I hate to be so morbid here," said Denny during the meeting, "but this is an amazing virus. It lives in the nasal passages, and once we cough, it spreads. Voila."

Within seconds, and almost as if on command, Commissioner Steve Stuart sneezed. "There's an example," said Denny. Everybody in the room fewer than a dozen people applauded. "What?" said Stuart as he recovered.

Thereupon somebody praised him for covering his cough, one of the precious few genuinely effective measures against the spread of the common cold or, should it ever happen, a pandemic flu.

Source: Columbian

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