Central Virginia health district planning drive-through H1N1 vaccine clinics

Central Virginia’s Health District is gearing up to offer drive-thru flu vaccine clinics as part of a public H1N1 vaccine campaign in the area.

Central Virginia Health District Director Kerry Gateley, in a public talk on Tuesday afternoon, said it might be early December before the health department receives enough H1N1 vaccine for a public campaign.

When that begins, the health district plans in part to use drive-thru tents, where vaccines can be given to people inside vehicles. One advantage to such a method, Gateley said, is that people don’t catch the flu while standing in line to get inoculated.

The district preformed a drill using this method in October 2008 with seasonal flu vaccines and was able to vaccinate more than 300 people in the space of a couple of hours.

Vaccines continue to trickle into the Health District.

“It’s 100 here, 200 there,” Gateley said. “We are having to watch our supply of vaccine.”

On Tuesday the health district conducted flu vaccine clinics at Holy Cross Regional Catholic School and James River Day School. It will conduct a third private school vaccination Friday, at Cornerstone Christian Academy in Appomattox.

Meanwhile, the health district is juggling vaccine doses so that people at highest risk, such as pregnant women, are not turned away. Last week, it transferred some vaccine from other areas of the district to the Bedford Health Department. Gateley said that some of the region’s private physicians, especially OB/GYNs, now also have vaccines available.

Gateley’s talk was titled “Pandemics: Panic or Preparation” and was given to members of the American Association of University Women, Lynchburg Branch. As part of his discussion of Health District preparations, Gateley mentioned that the district is working with local officials to plan for unpleasant “What If” scenarios.

One scenario would be hospitals so overwhelmed with flu patients that some patients might need to be housed elsewhere, which happened during the Spanish Influenza pandemic in 1918-19. Another scenario would see the Lynchburg area’s emergency response teams also overwhelmed with flu cases.

Despite these possible scenarios, the latest data show that the percent of emergency room and urgent care visits due to influenza-like illness in the Lynchburg area is back down in the 10- to 20-percent range for Oct. 25 through Nov. 7, down from more than 20 percent of all visits during the week ending Oct. 24.

Gateley believes it is too early to judge whether the virus is on the decline in the region. He said it is also not yet known whether H1N1 will become especially virulent during the regular flu season, in January and February.

“We are hoping it is just this kind of weird virus that doesn’t pay attention to seasonal weather,” Gateley said.

Gateley pointed to evidence of both similarities and differences between this new 2009 H1N1 strain and the Spanish Influenza strain prevalent in the early part of the 20th century.

That strain was also an H1N1 virus, with the H standing for a protein that initially attaches to a cell and the N standing for a protein that allows the virus to rupture host cells to release more viruses. The 1 refers in each case to a subtype of H or N.

Gateley said that in studies many people over the age of 65 were able to neutralize the new H1N1 virus as soon as it entered their bloodstream. This, along with the fact that seniors have not seen any increase in flu-like illness, leads experts to believe that people born before the late 1950s may have some immunity to this virus, thanks to exposure to the Spanish Influenza strain. On the other hand, this H1N1 strain is not causing the scope of deaths experienced during the outbreak of the Spanish Influenza.

Currently, the HIN1 virus is the only flu going around in the area. People may have colds or stomach viruses, Gateley said, but if they have the flu, characterized by high fever and aches, the diagnosis is H1N1.