Swine flu lesson: Wash your hands

<p>Instead of an apple for the teacher, Sonoma County students might be better served bringing a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer to school this fall.</p><p>With 71,000 students returning to class and no vaccine yet available for swine flu, public health officials say that cheap, portable hand sanitizers are a useful defense.</p><p>“I have one on my desk,” said Nancy Young, office manager at Hidden Valley School in Santa Rosa.</p><p>Health officials are downplaying school closures as a response to the flu, officially dubbed the H1N1 2009 virus, which has sent 32 people to hospitals and killed five people in Sonoma County.</p><p>Barring a mutation of the virus into a more potent form, public health officials said they will seek to avoid school closures. Any decision to close a campus would be made by health officers, not school officials, they said.</p><p>Public Health officials have recorded 170 swine flu cases in the county, but is not testing most potential cases.</p><p>Schools were shuttered last spring in some parts of the country when the flu emerged and was ultimately declared a global pandemic, but the situation has since changed, said Dr. Mark Netherda, deputy public health officer.</p><p>With the virus “fairly widespread” in the county, closing a school “wouldn’t do much to help stop the spread of the disease,” Netherda said.</p><p>The potential benefits of school closure are “often outweighed by negative consequences,” including students being left home alone and interruption of their education, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.</p><p>The CDC also recommended swine flu vaccinations for about 159 million people, including school-age children, or more than half the American public.</p><p>But the vaccine won’t be available until sometime between late September and early December, Netherda said Monday.</p><p>People who want it should get the regular seasonal flu shot now and await the H1N1 vaccine, he said. School-age children, along with pregnant women and health care workers, are among the groups advised to get both vaccinations.</p><p>Complete flu protection will require three shots: one for seasonal flu and two for H1N1. People over 65 are among the priority groups for seasonal flu vaccination but not for H1N1 immunization.</p><p>Meanwhile, the familiar precautions — frequent hand-washing, covering coughs and keeping sick children at home — are recommended to combat swine flu.</p><p>The California Department of Public Health underscored school use of hand sanitizers with at least 60 percent alcohol, noting they “can be made easily available in every classroom.”</p><p>A notice sent to all 40 Sonoma County school superintendents and 179 school principals states that school closures may be ordered only by health officials, not school administrators or school boards, said Carl Wong, the county schools chief.</p><p>“We are not in the position to make those decisions as educators,” Wong said.</p><p>Two drawbacks to closing schools are that parents may be working and students would not sequester themselves at home but would go to malls and theaters where they could contract the virus, Wong said.</p><p>Still, health officials are concerned that the H1N1 2009 virus may mutate, becoming more virulent, this fall and winter. The new flu’s “overall impact” should be “greater than in the spring,” the CDC said.</p><p>School closures could be ordered in situations where “multiple absences” of students or school staff make it difficult to continue operations, Netherda said.</p><p>The level of absences that would trigger a closure has not been determined, he said.</p><p>U.S. officials are monitoring H1N1 in the Southern Hemisphere, where the winter flu season is going on, and have so far seen no ominous change in the virus, Netherda said.</p><p>When the H1N1 vaccination arrives, about 250,000 county residents should be inoculated, he said. The vaccine would be shipped to doctors’ offices, clinics and pharmacies, and public health would assure that everyone who qualifies could get it.</p><p>Schools could be used as vaccination sites, but it would be done after classroom hours, Netherda said.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.</p>