Colleges prepare for swine flu

Sunday, October 4, 2009
Topics: Education, Health
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Last week alone, Ohio colleges reported 104 new cases of Swine Flu, and since college students fit right into the high risk population for H1N1, Ohio schools are trying to gear up for this year's flu season. ideastream®'s Ida Lieszkovszky has more on what local universities are doing to prepare, and if that's enough.

You might not want to think about this, especially if you have a child in college right now, but the college lifestyle is particularly conducive to the spread of illness. College students live in close quarters, share drinks at parties, and stress a lot, which can weaken the immune system. Plus anyone under 24 fits right into the high risk group for Swine Flu. So what are area schools doing to prepare for this years flu season?

Eileen Guttman is supervisor for health and wellness services at Cleveland State University. She says the best thing to do right now is to focus on prevention.

Guttman: Hopefully and this is where all schools, at least in the Ohio, especially Cleveland area are in a race against time are to get our students and high risk individuals vaccinated before it gets here because it’s coming and it’s coming quickly.

But the University isnt’s likely to have any swine flu vaccine for a few more weeks. Guttman says that since CSU is primarily a commuter campus, they don’t have the same concerns as schools where a lot of students live in dorms. However, they do have to deal with a more diverse group of students, many of whom have children, which means more ways to bring the disease on to campus.

At John Carroll University, where many of the students live in dorms, a space has been set aside in case there is a widespread outbreak. Sherri Crahen is dean of students at John Carroll.

Crahen: We have a floor in a residence hall that we can use that would be away from the other students. And it would give the sick students a place to recover in a quieter area and we would deliver meals to them and the nurses would check in on them.

Some schools, like Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, have gone so far as to set aside an entire building for students who get H1N1; they’ve dubbed it the Swine Flu dorm.

Frank Esper is an infectious disease specialist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. He says segregation may not be helpful.

Esper: I have a feeling that the influenza’s going to be so wide spread that isolating the students to one dorm on campus is probably not going to make too much of a difference when you’ve got influenza widespread throughout the community.

But there is some good news…sort of. Amy Ray is also an infectious disease specialist at University Hospitals.

Ray: It’s important to remember that the CDC projects that more than a million people so far in the U.S. have been affected; I’d think at this time that’s probably an underestimate, so the overall mortality rate for this virus is less than 1 percent.

The threat seems pretty mild on campuses so far. The American College Health Association found that out of over 27,000 reported cases of flu at US colleges, only 48 people have been hospitalized. None of those students have died directly from the flu.

And one more thing - to the dismay of many students, most colleges have no intention of canceling classes because of the flu. But some are urging professors to put more course work online so students can keep up, if they do get sick.