March 29, 2024
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County officials plan for pandemic Community leaders prepare for avian flu outbreak, hope their work is in vain

SKOWHEGAN – Skowhegan emergency services and community leaders are taking on a planning challenge that they hope will be an exercise in futility.

Fire and police chiefs, hospital administrators, education administrators, municipal leaders, volunteer agencies, and those representing the business sector gathered in two separate meetings Tuesday, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, to build the county’s pandemic flu response plan.

“This could be one of the biggest tasks we’re going to undertake,” Robert Higgins, the county’s emergency management director, said. “I don’t mind telling you that it scares the daylights out of me.”

Higgins explained that the Department of Homeland Security is providing each county’s local emergency planning committee with $10,000 for planning purposes.

The plan must be created and submitted by Aug. 1. It must provide information about mass vaccination sites, how to provide food and shelter for victims, emergency activation plans and, should the pandemic become deadly, arrangements for bodies.

“We already have a plan in place for disease outbreaks, but this one must be much more specific,” Higgins said.

At Tuesday morning’s meeting, Regional Epidemiologist Donna Guppy of the Maine Department of Health explained the characteristics of the avian flu, H5N1, and how it is spreading through migratory birds to other fowl around the world.

So far, she said, there have been no human-to-human contamination, just bird-to-human infection.

But influenza viruses have the ability to mutate and the world is preparing for the possibility of a pandemic.

“The premise is that H5N1 may or may not cause a pandemic,” she explained. But in the event it does, it could be catastrophic, Guppy said.

“You can expect 30 percent of the work force to be out sick at any one time,” she said.

“How do we continue to get food to people if everyone at the grocery store is out sick?” she posed.

Guppy also explained that a pandemic would come in two waves, 18 to 24 months apart. Complicating the issue, Guppy said, is that H5N1 is an avian flu and vaccines are grown in eggs.

“We need to be prepared,” she said. “The best way to keep this from spreading is to keep people separated.” That could mean the mandatory closure of businesses, schools, colleges and municipal governments.

Larry Pike, safety director of Redington Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan, said the issue of caring for dozens or hundreds of ill people could be complicated because Maine’s rural hospitals are owed $300 million in back Medicare payments from the state.

“More than half the hospitals in the state have been forced to cut back on the number of beds they have,” he said. “Where are we going to put these people?

“This needs to go back to the political arena. We can have the best plan in the world but it won’t work if we have no beds.”

“We have to think outside the box with this problem,” Higgins said.

The next planning session will be held at the Skowhegan Community Center on Route 2 at 9 a.m. Tuesday, April 25. Higgins said he hopes every community in Somerset County will be represented at that session.


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