Local hospitals brace for swine flu

As the number of swine flu cases increased internationally Tuesday, hospitals in the suburbs ramped up their readiness for a potential pandemic.

Local hospitals held emergency meetings, designated isolation areas, and set up communications and supply lines to handle the flu - which still hadn't turned up in Illinois.

One case of swine flu was confirmed in Indiana, and the number of cases nationally rose to 64. Some suspected cases in suburban hospitals were awaiting lab results.

As a precaution, officials at Alexian Brothers Health System set up hygiene stations at entrances to all its facilities, providing gloves and masks which some visitors put on as they entered.

They also converted isolation rooms to become waiting rooms for suspected cases, where they could be examined and tested without exposing other patients.

Some patients were coming in because they had flu symptoms, without having been to Mexico or exposed to swine flu, while others who are from Mexico but aren't sick were also seeking treatment.

To qualify as a suspected case, someone has to have at least two flu symptoms, such as a cough, chills, fever, sore throat, vomiting or diarrhea, and have been exposed by travel to affected areas within the past week, or exposed to someone from those areas who has flu symptoms.

Doctors and nurses are screening patients who come in with flu symptoms to see if they meet those criteria. If so, private practices generally send patients to a hospital for the proper nasal swab and lab to test for influenza.

If the initial test confirms the flu, it must be sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to see if it's the swine flu virus. That process can take three or four days.

By that time, it's too late to help with treatment, because anti-viral drugs generally must be given with 48 hours of the first symptoms to be effective.

But the test results are important for tracking the disease and preventing further spread.

At Delnor Community Hospital in Geneva, doctors were waiting for lab tests on three suspected cases.

Delnor stands prepared with eight airtight isolation rooms and an entire wing it could convert to isolation rooms if necessary, infection preventionist Lynn Skelton said. It also has 400 doses of anti-viral medication for the flu, and like all hospitals can request more from federal stockpiles if necessary.

Many hospital official were reluctant to state how many doses they had on hand, fearing a stampede by the public, to conserve the drugs for deserving cases.

At Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, spokesman Mike Deering said that Advocate set up a central supply station which could distribute medications to member hospitals as needed to cover both patients and employees.

At Edward Hospital in Naperville, where there are 29 "negative pressure" isolation rooms with separate filtered air systems, containment of infectious disease is part of everyday procedures, infection control manager Mary Anderson said.

"This is not an unusual practice for us,"she said.

Nevertheless, some critics, such as Maurice Ramirez, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Disaster Preparedness," maintains hospitals can't handle a worst-case scenario, as in the 1918 flu pandemic that killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide.

That may be so, admits Dr. Lynwood Jones, director of infection control for Alexian. Hospitals would be overwhelmed if there were thousands of cases, requiring tents, schools and gyms to handle the overflow, but he maintained most are reasonably prepared for more typical scenarios.

Based on the cases so far in the United States, he pointed out, most patients are not kept in the hospital, but are sent home with a prescription, so hospital capacity may not become an issue unless the course of the disease changes.