The P.E.I. government has closed its flu assessment centre in O'Leary after the number of new cases of swine flu dropped off over the weekend.
'I don't know if it's me wanting to be optimistic,' says chief health officer Dr. Heather Morrison about the likelihood of flu infections having peaked. (CBC)
The province's other three assessment centres, in Summerside, Charlottetown and Souris, will remain open. The centres are meant to ease pressure on hospital emergency departments.
During the weekend, visits to the centre in O'Leary fell to a point where health officials said it was no longer necessary. They said it would be reopened if required.
Another good sign for the province Monday was a declining number of schools reporting absentee rates of 10 per cent or more due to flu-like symptoms. That prompted chief health officer Dr. Heather Morrison to suggest the second wave of flu on the Island may have passed its peak.
"I don't know if it's me wanting to be optimistic, but I certainly have that sense from the last couple of days, that we haven't seen that continued sharp spike over the weekend," said Morrison.
"But again, I really remain cautious."
I suppose in Public health you are dammed either way - If you do too little and it is bad - you are blamed. If you do too much......
So what to do NEXT time?
In this case we made the Vaccine the be all and the end all. It's a bit like making anti biotics the be all and end all for infection in hospitals. What has been lost in hospitals is what Florence Nightingale learned at Scutari - than soap and water will take you 90% of the way.
My point is reduce the emphasis on a vaccine. Instead, look more to disrupting the environment for infection. Also look to helping people manage who get infected.
Take a systemic POV.
We made a start with a lot of emphasis on hand washing and how to sneeze etc. But we could have more maybe about how a virus works - how long it can stay active and so on. Help people know what they are up against. For instance, I had a huge debate with someone insisting on using anti bacterial soap - he could not see the difference between a germ and a virus. Knowing how a flu virus behaves and how to behave with them is helpful.
Help people cope with the flu when they have it - both in terms of their treatment, in terms of others in the house - and work out how to help working mothers cope.
Above all, assess the risk and be realistic. After the first 2 weeks in Mexico it was clear that this flu was infectious but not dangerous. Then as it passed through the Southern Hemisphere, it was clear that it was not mutating to something more lethal as had been the case of 1918.
We tend to put all our faith in medicine. Hence the panic and the cost of this intervention.
I would also start to acknowledge that there is a groundswell of concern about vaccines in general.
You can tell yourself that these people are silly - but that attitude will only make this worse. What is going on? Why are so many people reluctant?
I think that it is that big pharma have proved that they are not to be trusted! Countless cases of them rigging or hiding data have been revealed in recent years. The fact that they have made billions out of this epidemic does not help build trust. The final straw was that they asked for and received an indemnity.
Medicine is useful but highly overrated. We see this in the huge Lifestyle arena of heart disease, diabetes, even cancer in some cases.
Big Pharma is expert in exploiting our fears and hopes. But in most cases, changes in how we live offer the best results. But rather than even think about this, we take a pill? Our loss, Big Pharma's gain.
