TN starts giving swine flu vaccine to health-care workers

By Nicole Young, The Tennessean

The state's first H1N1, or swine flu, vaccines were given Monday to a group of health-care workers in Memphis, but health officials say the vaccine won't be available to the general public until early to mid-November.

While about 40,000 nasal spray vaccines, called FluMist, will be arriving in Tennessee throughout this week, those vaccines are for health-care workers.

"This is not the time for people to start calling and trying to schedule vaccinations," said State Health Department Commissioner Susan Cooper. "Forty thousand doses versus a population of 6 million in Tennessee is a small number. This is just the very beginning of the distribution.

"We'll have more doses and different kinds of vaccines in the following weeks."

Nashville mom Angie Henderson said she was hoping to get herself, her 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son vaccinated as soon as possible.

"We were expecting the vaccine to be available in mid-October, so it's a little disappointing," Henderson said. "But I can certainly understand why health-care workers will be vaccinated first."

So far, Henderson said her family has avoided the H1N1 virus.

"I feel fortunate," she said. "But, I think we've just been lucky. I guess we will make do, wait and see and try to stay healthy."

Cooper said state health officials order vaccines each week based on an allotment from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC may order as many as 250 million doses of the vaccine, which will be distributed to states based on population size. Tennessee, for example, has about
2 percent of the population, so it would get about 2 percent of the vaccine.

State epidemiologist Dr. Tim Jones said the amount of vaccine available was constantly changing, so there was no way to predict how much might be available at any given time.

"Whenever there is an allotment, we hear about it that morning and we put in our order right away," he said.

First in line to receive the vaccinations after health-care workers are high-risk patients such as pregnant women, children and those with chronic illness like diabetes. It will be up to physicians to decide which patients fall into the high-risk groups, Cooper said.

In Memphis, Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center received nearly 200 doses of FluMist vaccine on Monday. Le Bonheur and a hospital in Indianapolis were the first in the nation to receive vaccines. Cooper said the state health department had placed orders for all of the state's health-care facilities last week.

"I think they are looking at the hardest-hit," Cooper said. "Not only has the flu been widespread, but it's been focused into pockets. Le Bonheur has seen more than 6,000 children with flu-like symptoms and had more than 100 hospitalized."

Thousands of cases

The state has partnered with clinics across Tennessee to obtain specimens for H1N1 testing.

"This allows us ... to determine which viruses are circulating and what percentage of those are H1N1 versus seasonal," Jones said. "I can tell you that 100 percent of flu circulating in Tennessee is H1N1. Right now if someone has flu, it's almost certainly H1N1. I am confident that there have been many thousands of H1N1 cases in Tennessee, but we can't track every one."

Cooper said doctors and nurses were lined up at Le Bonheur to receive the vaccinations. No facility in Tennessee can impose mandatory vaccinations for any illness, she said, but the response was encouraging.

By day's end, about 150 doses were given. Some doses were saved for evening shift workers.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center spokesman Jerry Jones said the hospital was expecting a batch of vaccines Monday or today, but as of press time, it had not yet received a shipment.

Jones did not release how many vaccines the hospital had ordered.

"When they come in, then we might release how much we got as opposed to how much we ordered," he said.

In the past month, Vanderbilt's records showed a peak in flu-like illness at the beginning of September, but the statistics trended slightly downward for the rest of the month.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist with Vanderbilt, said the hospital's number of cases continues to fluctuate.

"We had a little spike again over the weekend, and that doesn't surprise me," Schaffner said. "We can hope for, but we can't expect it to plummet for a while. I think we can expect a plateau before this begins trending downward."

Flu keeps hospitals busy

On Sunday, Vanderbilt hospital records showed that more than 2,800 patients had been treated for flu-like illness in the past month.

Kristi Gooden, spokeswoman for Baptist Hospital, said Baptist's numbers were similar to what Vanderbilt was seeing.

"We had a peak at the beginning of last month and then a slight decline consistent with other hospitals in the area," Gooden said.

Baptist has confirmed 12 cases of H1N1 through lab testing but could not provide current data. Gooden said the hospital has ordered a shipment of the vaccine but wasn't sure when it would arrive.

Jones, the epidemiologist, said hospitals that had placed orders would be receiving vaccines within the week.

Swine flu vaccinations also began Monday with squirts up the noses of health-care workers in Indiana and Illinois.

"It's manufactured the same way as the seasonal
flu vaccine, and I never get the flu," said Jennifer McFarland, 30, an Indianapolis paramedic who swears by her annual vaccination and this year will need two - one to protect against swine flu and the other to protect against regular winter flu.

Arkansas earmarked its first shipment, expected today, for in-school vaccinations. Pennsylvania, too, will send early shipments to school-age kids in parts of the state where swine flu already is active.

"Take a deep breath, be patient, wait a couple of days, make another phone call and cut everyone a little slack because it's a little hectic out there, folks," Schaffner said.