Nunavut H1N1 immunization to take about two weeks

Leona Aglukkaq, the national health minister and David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health officer, at a press conference in Iqaluit held Oct. 13 to kick off a national tour aimed at promoting Canada’s massive H1N1 immunization program, now set to start in the first week of November. “It is immunization that will stop this pandemic,” Butler-Jones said. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

The Government of Nunavut estimates it will take them only two weeks to immunize everyone in the territory against the H1N1 swine flu virus, after the vaccination program starts early next month.

“With good planning, we estimate that within two weeks, we will have hit all the communities,” Geraldine Osborne, the GN’s deputy chief medical health officer, told reporters Oct. 13.

Osborne said five teams, each made up of three nurses and other support staff, will fan out to the territory’s large- and medium sized communities.

For smaller communities, current health centre staff will likely be able to do the work by themselves, she said.

“The smaller communites will be able to handle it themselves, small communities in the High Arctic such as Grise Fiord and Resolute, where the population is very small,” Osborne said.

She also said GN health officials want to see the “highest up-take” of the vaccine in Nunavut.

“Our population is an at-risk population. Predominately our population is young with a high rate of pregnant women. We have issues such as overcrowding. We have poor nutrition, and our population has poor lung health,” she said.

“It makes perfect sense for everyone in Nunavut to avail themselves of this opportunity to become immunized against H1N1. That’s my message,” Osborne said.

And Osborne said that as a result of a meeting held Oct. 9, Nunavut health officials have decided that residents can receive regular seasonal flu vaccinations at the same time as they receive H1N1 vaccinations.

Osborne provided the information at a hastily-organized press conference billed as a “town hall meeting” inside St. Jude’s Anglican Parish Hall in Iqaluit.

The precise start date for Nunavut’s vaccination program is still unclear.

But Leona Aglukkaq, the national health minister, told reporters that Canada will be able to begin vaccinations in the first week of November, a little earlier than the previously stated start-date of Nov. 15.

“Across Canada, chief public health officials agreed to work with the first week of November as the time-line to distribute the vaccine in communities, and I can say we are on schedule to meet that time-line,” Aglukkaq said.

Aglukkaq flew to Iqaluit on a federal government Challenger jet with Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health officer, and Dr. Danielle Grondin, an assistant deputy minister in the federal health department.

They used the Iqaluit event to to kick-off a three-week tour aimed at promoting Canada’s upcoming H1N1 vaccination campaign, the biggest in the country’s history.

Agglukkaq said federal health officials want to use such gatherings to answer questions from “regular people” — though the Iqaluit forum consisted mostly of GN health department employees rounded up at short notice to fill the hall.

They’re aiming a big part of their messsage at people who think they don’t need the vaccine and people who think the vaccine may be dangerous.

“It is really important to know what is myth and what is fact,” Butler-Jones said.

“It is safe and it is effective. Vaccines are one of the safest and most effective tools of modern medicine… It is immunization, at the end of the day, other than all of us getting infected, that will stop this pandemic,” he said.

Butler-Jones said vaccines rank among the most studied of all health care tools.

“Careful research into the safety of vaccines goes on long before it’s actually in widespread use,” he said.

And he said the serious side effects that some people fear are extremely rare and usually “have nothing to do with the vaccine itself.”

Without immunization, 25 per cent to 30 per cent of the population could get sick with swine flu in Canada and around the world, Butler-Jones said.

“That is where the big impact happens,” he said.

And even Canada’s modern health care system is able to treat severely ill people in intensive care units, unlike in 1918 when millions died in a global pandemic caused by a form of the H1N1 virus, “nobody should take this disease for granted.”

But Butler-Jones said he doesn’t believe it’s necessary for pregnant women — a vulnerable group — to stay away from work during the pandemic, especially if they’ve been immunized.