First swine flu shots set

Published 10:55 pm Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The public will get its first shot at getting the swine flu vaccine during a series of one-day events being held throughout Snohomish County beginning Oct. 31.

The goal of the mass vaccination clinics is to immunize about 100,000 adults and children in 26 days, ranking it as one of the county’s largest-ever vaccination campaigns.

Initially, the vaccines will be reserved for those at highest risk for complications from swine flu. They include: pregnant women, people who have contact with infants under 6 months, children and young adults from 6 months to 24 years old, those between the ages of 25 to 64 years old with chronic health conditions, teachers and child-care workers.

The vaccine comes in two forms: an injection and a nasal spray; there are limits on who can receive the spray.

While many of the county’s immunization events are taking place at schools or churches, one of the most unusual events will occur in Stanwood on Halloween.

There, people can drive up and be immunized while sitting in their cars.

Trying to plan for what could be high demand for the approximately 1,000 children and adult doses that will be available that day, organizers decided to hold the event at Heritage Park.

“Stanwood being a fairly small community, we thought we might have traffic problems,” said Mike Simmons, emergency manager for the Stanwood-Camano Fire Department.

“Collecting it into one area, and kind of doing it mass-inoculation style seemed to solve several problems,” he said.

It helps with the traffic and prevents situations that can occur in clinics where people who are well are exposed to people who are ill, he said.

An agreement between health officers in Snohomish and Island counties allows people from Camano Island to come to the Stanwood event, he said.

In previous years, Stevens Hospital in Edmonds has sometimes organized similar one-day drive-through events to administer seasonal flu shots.

The county’s swine flu immunization campaign is part of nationwide effort to vaccinate people even as swine flu is spreading widely in states across the nation, including Washington.

Some area walk-in clinics say the number of patients they’re treating with flulike symptoms is unusually high for October, about the same as they usually see during the traditional peak of flu season in January and February.

It’s too early to know whether the number of cases will continue to rise even higher in the coming winter months.

The first shipments of the vaccine began arriving in Snohomish County on Friday, and doses continue to arrive this week.

Those first doses, a nasal spray immunization called FluMist, are reserved for health care workers, police and firefighters.

The Everett Clinic received about 200 doses on Wednesday.

“Believe me, everybody is calling me,” Dr. Yuan-Po Tu said of demand from fellow workers at The Everett Clinic. “You don’t want to get infected and be out of work for seven days.”

Even if kids or adults are suspected of having swine flu in the spring, health officials still suggest that people who are in the priority groups get the inoculation — unless their cases were later confirmed through special testing at state or federal labs.

“Even if you’ve been infected with the virus, getting a shot will not hurt you and is not a bad idea,” Tu said. “It boosts your immune system (response) for this virus.”

Swine flu already has rewritten influenza history with its initial outbreak in the spring, infecting enough people worldwide for it to be declared a pandemic.

It has since rebounded for a second wave of infection.

Between Aug. 30 and Oct. 3, 3,874 people were hospitalized with some type of flu and 240 people have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The overwhelming majority of current flu cases are swine flu.

More than 12,000 people have been hospitalized from pneumonia and other influenza complications, according to the federal health agency and 1,544 have died from pneumonia or flu-related health problems.

The CDC estimates that an average of about 36,000 deaths each year in the U.S. are related to seasonal flu.

A review of about 1,400 adults and more than 500 children hospitalized for swine flu found that most had some underlying health problem, such as asthma, lung or heart disease or immune system problems, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a director at the CDC.

Children with other health issues were also at higher risk of serious illness from flu, she said. These include neuromuscular diseases such as cerebral palsy, those with sickle cell anemia and other blood disorders.

Pregnant women also are at higher risk for influenza complications — accounting for 6 percent of the 1,400 adults hospitalized with influenza.

All these factors underscore the federal health agency’s recommendations for high-risk groups to get the vaccine when it becomes available, she said.

Sharon Salyer:425-3393486, salyer@heraldnet.com.