Bangor flu clinic part of emergency plan Scores vaccinated in regional health preparedness effort

BANGOR – Teresa Norman, a resident of Jayess, Miss., was in Bangor Wednesday getting a flu vaccine along with her sister Gwen Trenholm of Hermon. The sisters, now in their mid-70s, grew up in Maine, but Norman moved away in the 1940s.

“I try to come home for a visit every summer, though,” she said.

This year, Norman’s stay was extended by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but she said she’ll be heading back South soon. Rubbing her upper arm, she said she was glad to have gotten “a good Yankee vaccine” to get her through this year’s flu season.

Like the hundreds of others who turned out at the Spectacular Event Center on Wednesday to get their annual vaccine, Norman and Trenholm probably didn’t realize they were taking part in a new regional emergency preparedness system recently developed to manage widespread disasters, epidemics and other health care crises in eastern Maine.

“We’re using the flu clinics to help work out the glitches,” said Kathy Knight, director of the Northeast Regional Resource Center, one of three publicly funded emergency preparedness centers in Maine, all of which are linked to major hospital centers. Knight, who also handles emergency preparedness for Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems in Brewer, said routine vaccine clinics offer useful training opportunities for managing larger scale and more critical public health interventions that could be needed in the event of a terrorist attack, a disease outbreak, a major toxic spill or other disaster.

“Any situation that calls for mass immunization or medical prophylaxis,” Knight said, watching the predominantly elderly crowd file through the clinic space in an orderly fashion. “We’ve created a command structure, set up a floor plan and adapted the paperwork so that we can be ready to set up a medical distribution and vaccination center at a moment’s notice.”

Actually, she reflected, it would probably take four to six hours to contact staff, gather equipment and open an initial site; a network of other sites could be up and treating the public within 24 hours.

The command structure identifies key positions responsible for specific operations and insures that everyone working at a site knows precisely what his or her job is and to whom they should report.

Since 2003, Knight has been working closely with a number of other groups in the Bangor area to develop a strategy for dealing with a public health crisis. Providers from St. Joseph Healthcare, nursing students, a private bus service, a state epidemiologist, school nurses, police and fire officials and others are on board and ready to perform a range of services. For example, in the event of a health care emergency or terrorist attack, a strong police presence would help keep order as medications or other treatments are dispensed. Traffic would be carefully controlled, with buses shuttling people to the site from outlying parking areas.

But on Wednesday, all was calm. Friendly members of the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Maine greeted people at the door and directed them to the room where the vaccines were being given. Staff from Community Health and Counseling Services helped them fill out their forms and pay the appropriate amount for their vaccine. Nursing students from the university and Husson College assisted city nurses in administering the injections. Just outside, a Bangor Fire Department ambulance was parked at the ready, in case anyone got ill or injured. The line flowed smoothly – by 11 a.m. almost 250 people had been immunized against this year’s influenza bug.

Patty Hamilton, director of public health nursing for the city of Bangor, said earlier this week that the emergency preparedness model and command structure would help prevent the dramatic scenes that arose last year, when a shortage of vaccine created a near panic-situation. At one October vaccine clinic, temperatures hovered in the 30s while over a thousand people, many of them elderly and chronically ill, queued anxiously outside.

Hamilton said there’s no reason to think there isn’t sufficient vaccine this year for all who want it. Though recent alarm about a possible worldwide avian influenza epidemic may make the annual garden-variety flu season feel suddenly less threatening, Hamilton says it’s still just as important as ever for people to roll up their sleeves for the routine vaccine.

For a list of flu vaccine clinics in the Bangor area, go to the Web site of St. Joseph Healthcare at www.stjoseph-me.org or call the Bangor public immunization clinic at 992-4548. Many supermarkets and pharmacies throughout the state also will be hosting vaccine clinics; call local stores or health care providers for more information.