As we reported last night, health inspectors in San Ignacio took the decision to close Sacred Heart High School for the rest of this week after 250 students reported having flu-like symptoms. Caye Caulker schools which were closed last week is now back up to normal and while some school children are still home recovering, yesterday those schools reported no new cases exhibiting symptoms. And Dr. Pitts says that’s the strategy: to stop the spread either by drastic measures such as a school closure of simply encouraging parents to keep sick children at home.
Dr. Michael Pitts,
“Now we have an outbreak of flu and obviously it’s in different communities and its moving along. For H1N1 the majority of the population is not immune so we will expect that this will affect just about everybody. Our objective is to not try and stop the disease but to limit the speed of spread and how many get sick on any particular day. To the extent that we can change that, that is what we are trying to do. For example in the schools where we saw one school with 33% of the students affected, we said close the school and slow that down. In some other schools where we saw maybe 5% and 10% and so on, we said okay, the strategy there could be to just make those who are sick stay home.
The bottomline response though still remains at a community level where people have to keep vigilant, they have to wash their hands, cover their sneeze, cover their cough, and if they are sick, they stay away from the work or school or mass gathering and they go to the doctor. Most people can be treated right now with antihistamines and antipyretics; basically Benadryl. We are trying to avoid aspirin use at this time.”
Jules Vasquez,
“Unfortunately the artifact of the April and May scare is that when people hear swine flu or that you have swine flu, it is seen to be or it is perceived to be something grave, something serious.”
Dr. Michael Pitts,
“Right but I think during April-May, I took pains out at the end of the period to say the disease from instead of being to the right, it is more to the left where the cases are milder. So for the population they need to understand. It is still a new disease, most people will get it. The good thing is that most who get the disease are getting mild forms and we have medication available to deal with them.”
Jules Vasquez,
“Is the idea, the strategy right now is to sort of manage the inevitable proliferation of this virus?”
Dr. Michael Pitts,
“Yes it is here, the virus is here, it is proliferating in the population and it is following natural history. So it moves from this big epidemic, pandemic scare, high fatality to a now mild disease, it is in the population, seeping through and it will move from here now to a situation where it becomes endemic.”
It’s important to note that only 0.007% to 0.045% of those infected with swine flu worldwide are dying of it, which is about the same as the seasonal flu – meaning that H1N1 is no more deadly than the regular flu. If you have questions about swine flu in your area the hotline is still open. The number for that is 629-5604.
