Swine flu vaccine trickles in

By Owen Boss

Staff Writer

As hospitals and clinics across the Valley continue administering the few swine flu vaccinations available to the area's highest-risk residents, including infants, pregnant women and frontline health care workers - the question on everyone's mind seems to be: when will vaccines be made available to the general public?

The answer: when larger shipments from the nation's Center for Disease Control reach the state's Department of Public Health and those residents with chronic underlying conditions such as asthma, leukemia and cystic fibrosis have already been vaccinated.

According to the Center for Disease Control's Web site, which is updated daily, of the 16.8 million doses of H1N1 vaccine shipped to hospitals across the country, 404,500 have landed in the Bay State. Although the federal government originally called for 200 million vaccines for the country's estimated 300 million residents, production has been slower than expected.

Sheila Streeter, operations manager for Northampton Area Pediatrics, which will hold two walk-in vaccination clinics this weekend for asthmatic children ages 6 months to 3 years old, said she was wary of specifying how many doses of H1N1 vaccine they currently have because of increasing demand.

"I would rather not say the number. We have to try to do this in a controlled fashion and we only have so much vaccine," Streeter said. "If we run out and there are still patients, we are going to end up having to close the clinic."

Despite the limited amount of vaccine, Streeter said the plan is to continue rolling out clinics as vaccine trickles in. Once all "priority groups" have been vaccinated, those residents without underlying conditions will have their chance.

"As we work through our high-risk patients and more of the vaccine comes in, we will be increasing our clinics and hopefully we will eventually be offering it to all of our patients," she said.

According to a press release from the Amherst Health Department, the town has received 200 doses of H1N1 vaccine, most of which have already been distributed to pediatric and obstetric facilities in town. A portion of the vaccinations, the release states, were reserved for Amherst first-responders, and the town expects to receive another 200 doses in the near future.

Joanne Levin, medical director of infection prevention at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, said the problem with giving residents a specific time line for increased shipments of the vaccine is that area hospitals don't know day-to-day how many doses they will receive.

Levin said Cooley Dickinson reports to the state's Department of Public Health every Monday letting them know how much of the vaccine was used the previous week, and to which age groups it was administered. Based on those totals, she said, the DPH releases a new weekly or biweekly supply.

For more information about the swine flu, visit www.mass.gov.dph/flu or www.cdc.gov/swineflu.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.