By Rusty Marks
The Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, S.C. — It will be months before Kanawha County health providers will have enough swine flu vaccine to inoculate everyone who should get the shots.
So, one of their biggest jobs will be figuring out who gets the vaccine, and when.
“That’s going to be a tough job, figuring out how to prioritize,” said Brenda Isaac, president of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Board.
“It’s a challenge,” agreed Dr. Rahul Gupta, chief health officer for the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department.
About 75 people, including Charleston and Kanawha County officials, health-care providers, emergency responders and other officials met Tuesday for a swine flu symposium at the Charleston Civic Center.
At the urging of Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper, Health Department officials, health providers and city and county officials agreed recently to form a task force to attack the H1N1 swine flu virus which has killed about 600 Americans since being discovered in April.
Most of those at Tuesday’s symposium will be in the task force. Gupta presented background information about swine flu so that the task force will be ready when flu season arrives this fall.
World health officials declared swine flu a global pandemic over the summer. Officials for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped counting American swine flu cases in July, by which time more than 1 million Americans had been infected with the virus.
Gupta said the swine flu spreads easily from person to person. A similar strain of the H1N1 virus in 1918 killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide, including 650,000 in the United States. About 30 percent of the world’s population got the virus.
Gupta expects about the same percentage of people will get the swine flu. But because the current virus is much less virulent than the 1918 Spanish Flu, health officials expect the death rate to be much lower.
Even so, health officials expect the swine flu to kill up to 90,000 people in the United States. Normal seasonal flus kill about 36,000 Americans a year, he said.
Federal health officials plan to provide swine flu vaccinations to all 50 states, but Gupta said it will be mid-October before vaccine begins to arrive. People who should be vaccinated first include health-care workers, pregnant women, people who take care of children less than 6 months old, those between 6 months and 24 years old and those between 25 and 64 with chronic health conditions.
Those who should get the vaccine make up about half the population, or about 100,000 people in Kanawha County, Gupta said.
But he said West Virginia can only expect about 270,000 doses of swine flu vaccine in October for the entire state, of which about 29,000 doses will be available for Kanawha County residents. Health officials estimate it will be mid-January before enough vaccine is delivered to vaccinate everyone who should get shots.
Health-care workers, who have to take care of those who are ill with the virus and are also more likely to come in contact with people with swine flu, will probably be given top priority for vaccinations. Charleston Area Medical Center alone employs about 6,000 people, Gupta said. Add in other hospitals, private practice doctors, paramedics, school nurses and other health-care providers and the available vaccine will be used up quickly.
“It’s not going to be a vaccine shortage, but the way it’s distributed it may look like a shortage,” Gupta said. He said local officials will have to decide how to best manage and distribute the available vaccine.
“We need to all decide as a county,” he said.
Copyright 2009 Charleston Newspapers