H1N1 vaccine clinics hit by 'pent-up demand'
Long waits for flu shots
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 8:12 AM ET
CBC News
Workers at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's line up for the H1N1 vaccination. (CBC)The federal government has ordered enough H1N1 vaccine for every Canadian, but it's not possible to provide it to everyone all at once.
Long lineups for the swine flu vaccine continued Tuesday outside clinics in Calgary and Edmonton.
People were facing three-hour waits at a shopping centre in Edmonton and more than three hours at a mall clinic in southeast Calgary.
Outside a clinic in Elmsdale, on the boundary of Hants and Halifax counties in Nova Scotia, the lineup snaked through the parking lot on Tuesday morning.
"We want to get it over with," said Kathy Mauger, who waited a couple of hours with her three boys. "We don't want the kids to miss a lot of school."
Ottawa Public Health also increased staffing after delivering 4,200 inoculations and then turning away people on opening day.
"There's quite a pent-up demand," Gavin Wilson, a spokesman for health authority Vancouver Coastal Health, said Monday. "I think people have been hearing about the vaccine for quite a long time now, and it's here and people are eager to get it."
Turnout was higher than expected in the Vancouver area, with one clinic turning people away after administering all of its 350 doses of the vaccine.
Generally, provincial and territorial health officials have asked people in high-risk groups to seek out the H1N1 vaccine first, but said they would not check medical histories before offering the vaccine.
In the United States, some Americans have also waited in long lines for the pandemic vaccine.
The amount of vaccine available to ship to doctors and clinics in the U.S. has increased to 22.4 million doses from about 14.1 million a week ago, Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Tuesday.
“We’re getting to a level where it will be significantly easier to find and receive the vaccine,” Frieden said.
U.S. cases
U.S. President Barack Obama has declared swine flu a national emergency, which Frieden called a "pre-emptive move" that offers another tool to help health-care workers responding to a large influx of patients.
On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged people waiting in line for the shots not be discouraged, but said it was expected that the vaccine would be supplied in waves. She spoke to three national network morning shows.
About 1,000 deaths in the United States have been attributed to swine flu. As of Oct. 22, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported 86 swine flu deaths.
Worldwide, more than 414,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic influenza H1N1 2009 and nearly 5,000 deaths had been reported to the World Health Organization as of Oct. 17, the UN group said Friday.
On Tuesday, health officials in Toronto confirmed that a 13-year-old boy had died of the virus.
"The burden of disease is in young children," said Dr. Donald Low, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and the medical director of Ontario's Public Health Laboratories.
In the U.S., which Low said is about four weeks ahead of Ontario in entering the second wave of the pandemic, about half of hospitalized patients and one-quarter of the people dying of H1N1-related causes are under the age of 25.
Many are teenagers, and about 70 per cent of them have some underlying medical condition such as asthma, muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy.
With files from The Canadian Press
