Preparing for flu this fall

Dr. Scott Halperin expects that flu infections will ease off this summer before increasing again in the fall.

The World Health Organization’s decision to declare the swine flu outbreak a pandemic makes the job of scientists charged with evaluating flu vaccines more urgent.

“Initially, we planned to do this work on a more gradual basis,” says Scott Halperin, the Dalhousie professor who was just tapped just a week earlier by Canada’s Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq to lead a national influenza research network. “But now we’ve got to be ready for the fall. The pace has definitely been accelerated."

Dr. Halperin, director of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology and Dalhousie professor of pediatrics and microbiology & immunology, says drug manufacturers started work on a vaccine for the H1N1 virus just as soon as it was isolated in the days after the first cases were identified in Mexico in early April. The network, created through a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), will be evaluating the safety and effectiveness of those vaccines.

But right now, with the flu being “not overly virulent” in Canada, says Dr. Halperin, it’s not known if a vaccination program for H1N1 will be implemented.

“That decision is yet to come,” he says. “We’re going to have to wait for the epidemiology.”

After breaking out with just a few cases in mid-April—including among students at a private school in Windsor, N.S. who went on a school trip to Mexico—the flu has spread to all provinces and territories in Canada, except Newfoundland and Labrador. There have been almost 3,000 confirmed cases and four deaths.

In recent days, the number of flu cases has shot up in the North and in remote aboriginal communities.

Around the globe, 74 countries reported 27,737 confirmed cases of H1N1 flu and 141 deaths. Under WHO’s pandemic alert level, a pandemic is declared at Phase 6, the highest level, when WHO sees evidence of sustained spread.

Dr. Halperin expects the numbers of people becoming infected with the virus will ease off in the summer, but that cases will increase again in the fall—the same time as seasonal flu strains hit.

The Public Health Agency of Canada's website says the common flu sends about 20,000 Canadians to hospital each year. Between 4,000 and 8,000 Canadians die of influenza and its complications annually, depending on the severity of the season.

The last pandemic -- the Hong Kong flu – was called in 1968; like H1N1 flu, it also caused moderate illness among most afflicted but killed about one million people.