Well finally a bit of good news! Canada will receive 1.8 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine next week consisting of 1 million containing the adjuvant and then 800,000 of the adjuvant free version for pregnant women. I know the Federal Government has been scrutinized heavily over how they are handling this H1N1 pandemic as they have been unable to have enough supply for the demand. Last week the manufacturer did not supply enough H1N1 vaccine as promised from the producer GlaxoSmithKline Inc. Why would Canada solely rely on one supplier of H1N1 vaccine instead of having a backup plan or another supplier to make sure this wouldn’t happen? It just doesn’t make sense! Although the good news is we will receive 1.8 million doses of H1N1 vaccine sometime next week.
Now schools are reporting many cases of H1N1 and it’s growing fast and it will continue to do so. In a press conference Dr. Eilish Cleary, NB chief medical officer of health said that she would predict that close to 2000 people in New Brunswick have H1N1 and it would continue to grow. Although there are only over a couple hundred confirmed cases of H1N1 they predict for every one confirmed case there could be 5 up to 10 more cases that are not confirmed. Dr. Cleary did say that more cases of H1N1 are being shown sooner then expected and just shows that its spreading.
So far H1N1 has caused hospitalizations across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI. There are 21 cases of H1N1 hopitalizations in Nova Scotia, 18 in New Brunswick and 15 in PEI. Most of the people being infected with the H1N1 virus are kids under 2, pregnant women and older people with health conditions.
In Nova Scotia, Dr. Robert Strang, Chief Medical Officer of Health admitted that tough decisions needed to be made for the priority groups, those who will get the H1N1 vaccine. It’s been very tough on him and his colleagues but they are trying the best that they can. With the recent news of Canada getting 1.8 million doses of H1N1 vaccine is good news they are hoping for as much as they can get. So far in Nova Scotia there are 377 reported cases of H1N1 and schools continue to show high absenteeism rates. Some schools were showing anywhere from 10% to as high as 30-45%. Dr. Strang said to the School Board that it’s their decision on when they believe that they should close down the schools due to H1N1 to help prevent the spread.
It is great that we are getting the 1.8 million doses of H1N1 vaccine early next week hopefully but it is not nearly enough as we need right at this time. Public Health Officers are hoping to be able to expand the H1N1 vaccinations into other priority groups but they need to wait until they know how much each individual province will receive for their portion of the H1N1 vaccines.
On other news their is a report that states that Canada is looking for another supplier to try and get more H1N1 vaccine quicker. We’ll see how this turns out but seems like they are now trying to make things better as we all know how H1N1 clinics have been being run and the lack of vaccine we’ve all seen. The general public is getting frustrated and now they are trying to correct this issue as they see how fast the H1N1 flu virus is spreading. Hopefully they can correct it fast enough now!
