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State officials say they're in good shape preparing for pandemic
12/16/2006, 7:36 a.m. ET
By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN
The Associated Press
LANSING, Mich. (AP) ? Every day, doctors and hospitals go online to report to the state what diseases they're seeing around Michigan.
Through that electronic monitoring, state health officials can instantly pinpoint signs of disease outbreaks and know where they're occurring. In the case of a flu pandemic, that up-to-the-moment information could prove invaluable.
"It sometimes took us hours or days to find where disease outbreaks were" in the past, said T.J. Bucholz, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Community Health. Now, with the monitoring in place, "it really reduces the response time that it takes to make decisions that would save lives."
But it's the hands-on practice dealing with disasters in recent years that have given health officials their best test of what would work and what wouldn't if a flu pandemic hit.
The power outage that affected part of Michigan and other states in August 2003, for instance, required state and local officials to work together to make sure people had enough food and water and some way to stay cool in the blistering summer heat.
Grocery stores in southeast Michigan ran out of water; fuel pumps at gasoline stations didn't work once electricity was cut; and no one could get money out of ATM machines. Since a flu pandemic could create a similar scenario if enough people were sickened or quarantined, the power outage was good practice, Bucholz said.
Dr. Jackie Scott, director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness, said the state also has plenty of experience helping vulnerable populations, especially children, the elderly and the disabled.
It has created networks through the state Agency on Aging, local health departments, schools and other organizations to make sure no one falls through the cracks, whether in a natural disaster or a health emergency.
"We really do that every year when we have ice storms and breakdowns in services," Scott said. "We have a whole system in place and it's been in place for many years."
The state has hundreds of pharmacists working statewide voluntarily to be prepared for a disease outbreak. It has loaded up emergency centers and staff with hand-held radios, ham radios and satellite phones to make sure everyone can communicate.
It's also working on a modular emergency medical system, or surge system, that would take people away from hospitals and instead send them to facilities such as a school gymnasium outfitted with beds and medical equipment to deal with sick or injured people. Local governments and hospitals are looking at their own systems for handling large numbers of sick people.
That could be especially important in a flu pandemic, Scott said, because the state estimates it could have 51,000 ill individuals who might need hospitalization in a moderate outbreak.
Although health officials wouldn't give the number of spaces available in hospitals, they said more hospital beds would be needed in these satellite locations ? and possibly in other locations if the pandemic was larger than expected.
Then, "we would need federal assistance," Scott said.
In the 1918 flu pandemic, few cases had been reported in late September, but there were 21,541 cases and 922 deaths by the time the pandemic peaked in the state in late October, according to Alex Azar, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Back then, a nurse and a doctor had to travel by a train handcar to reach loggers at remote logging camps in the Upper Peninsula. They loaded sick people onto mattresses on a flatbed car and brought them to where they could be treated.
Those kinds of scenarios would be far rarer if a flu pandemic struck today. But Michigan still has plenty of remote spots, and its urban areas are far more crowded than the cities that existed early in the last century, presenting new challenges.
The state has received $9.8 million from the federal government to prepare for a flu pandemic. Of that, more than 80 percent has gone to hospitals, emergency management officials and local health departments and their partners so they can buy medical supplies.
According to the Web site for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government is picking up the tab for about 1.5 million doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu for Michigan, while the state will pay for about 1.1 million more doses, with 25 percent of the cost being picked up by the federal government.
The state Department of Community Health has asked for $16.7 million to cover its share and is awaiting legislative approval on its supplemental budget request. Half the Tamiflu has been received so far, and the rest is expected to be delivered in early January, Bucholz said.
Some hospitals and local health organizations also are stockpiling Tamiflu, said Dr. Eden Wells, the MDCH's pandemic flu coordinator.
Among the questions that would have to be decided if a pandemic struck was whether schools should be closed. Local health officers and superintendents probably would make the decision together, although the governor could issue an across-the-board executive order, Scott said.
State and local health officials, along with hospitals, emergency medical technicians, faith-based organizations and groups such as the Red Cross have participated in one or more of the 90 flu pandemic exercises state health officials have run in the past year and a half.
"All the local health departments ... are doing mass vaccination exercises," Scott said. The state also has created a Web site on emergency preparedness for the public and health care workers to check that gives information about quarantines, disease prevention, and what to do in a natural, chemical, radiological or biological disaster.
The site is continually updated, and the state has been running television ads statewide since September promoting it.
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On the Net:
Michigan Prepares: http://michigan.gov/michiganprepares
Michigan Department of Community Health: http://www.michigan.gov/mdch
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: http://www.hhs.gov
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