By Christina Orlovsky, senior staff writer
“Are you up to date? Vaccinate!” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Immunization Program. August 1 kicks off National Immunization Awareness Month, a nationwide campaign to increase awareness about immunization as an essential method to prevent potentially life-threatening diseases.
A free educational kit is available throughout August on the National Immunization Awareness Month Web site.
During the 2004 flu season, a limited vaccination supply kept health care workers, the United States government and the American public on high alert. This year, the situation could get much worse, according to a report from Trust for America’s Health (TFAH), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the health of communities nationwide.
The group issued a warning that more than half a million Americans could die and more than 2.3 million could be hospitalized in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak, said Michael Earls, co-author of the TFAH report “A Killer Flu?”
“A pandemic occurs when a novel virus never seen before emerges,” Earls said. “Pandemics typically emerge a few times a century. In the 20th century, there were three: a severe outbreak in 1918, a milder outbreak in 1957 and an even milder one in 1968.”
Earls added that researchers predict the severity of the next pandemic to fall between that of the 1918 and 1968 outbreaks.
Concern has arisen in recent months due to the existence of the so-called avian flu in Southeast Asia. Although it has taken roughly 50 lives so far, Earls said, the virus has a great potential for devastation.
“If the genetic makeup of the avian flu crosses with a human virus strain, there would be a gene swapping and the new strain would be highly transmissible between human populations,” Earls explained. “Because we have such an interconnected world, an outbreak would have a massive impact on health consequences and the global economy.”
Acknowledging that flu vaccination is the “primary method” for preventing flu and its complications, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on July 13 its 2005 recommendations for flu prevention.
The report classified the following three groups at highest risk of flu infection and therefore at highest need for vaccination: the elderly, children ages 6-to-24 months, pregnant women and people with chronic medical conditions; people aged 50 to 64; and people that live with or care for people at high risk, such as health care workers or live-in family caregivers.
The CDC also asserted that it would assess the flu vaccine supply throughout the manufacturing process in an attempt to avoid a shortage. The agency has said it is planning for “multiple scenarios” of vaccine availability this upcoming flu season.
According to the CDC Web site, the agency is also supporting preparation for a flu pandemic, which it said would “last much longer than most other emergency events and may include ‘waves’ of influenza activity separated by months.” For this reason, the agency said it “supports pandemic influenza activities in the areas of surveillance (“detection”), vaccine development and production, antiviral stockpiling, research, and public health preparedness.”
For more information, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.
Earls added that the group’s intention is not to be alarmist, but simply to alert policymakers and health care professionals about the weaknesses in health care delivery if such an outbreak were to occur and to make recommendations about proactive improvements to the health care system that could possibly reduce the severity of the potential outbreak.
“Our overall recommendations are focused on what policymakers can do on a federal, state, city and county level to prepare,” he said. “A lot of the recommendations also have resonance for first responders in the health care setting.”
Earls asserted that the recommendations TFAH has put forth speak not only to the potential pandemic flu, but also to the annual flu that kills an estimated 40,000 people each year. Those that would be affected by a pandemic flu, he said, fall into the same general categories as annual flu victims: the immune-compromised, elderly and infirmed.
Most of the recommendations from the TFAH come from estimates from the World Health Organization, which suggests that a community be prepared to treat 25 percent of its population—the estimated number of people that would be affected by a new flu strain. Based on these figures, 66.9 million Americans are at risk of contracting the flu virus. Earls explained that the United States is only prepared with antiviral medications to treat 5.3 million.
“We are calling for an increased emphasis on the procurement of the antiviral medication Tamiflu, which, though not as effective as an exact vaccine, is a stopgap measure, especially for protecting the front-line workforce,” Earls said.
The organization is also calling for policymakers to take steps toward the following:
- Outbreak tracking, stockpiling medical supplies and developing of emergency communication plans.
- Stockpiling additional antivirals and developing surge capacity plans for hospitals and health care providers.
- Increasing vaccine production and the development of new technologies for vaccines.
“A lot of these things would resonate for other health threats as well, such as a bioterror attack,” Earls said. The important thing, he said, is to be prepared.
“We don’t know when a pandemic will emerge, but we shouldn’t wait until it does to take these steps,” he added. “We need to be proactive.”
For more information, visit the Trust for America’s Health Web site.
© 2005. AMN Healthcare, Inc. All Rights Reserved.