Tents Set Up In Parking Garage for Flu Patients In St. Louis Children’s Hospital
Wednesday, Sep 30, 2009 @07:52pm CDT
Officials at a St. Louis Children’s Hospital are concerned about the number of potential Swine Flu cases.
So much that they are setting up tents outside the hospital just in case.
They’re called Emergency Unit Overflows and can act as a so-called mini ER.
Crews spent Tuesday afternoon putting up two tents in the parking garage.
Up to twenty kids can be treated there.
Hospital officials say the ER is seeing 30% more kids than normal and the tents give them more room.
The hospital assured patients and parents that the tents will not be used to isolate kids with flu.
Instead, children with non-life threatening conditions will be seen there.
Dr. Alexis Elward of the Children’s Hospital says,” this will help us treat patients more efficiently and more quickly. We hope that we’ll improve patient satisfaction so that we can have patients waiting in the emergency room for shorter periods of time.”
Other hospitals around the country are also using tents to help handle overcrowded emergency rooms.
Tents are popping up in cities including Memphis, Nashville, Austin, and Atlanta.
http://ozarksfirst.com/content/fulltext/?cid=191781
Important points that can be taken from this abstract...
- There are not only high-pathogenic and low-pathogenic H5N1 viruses, but “lesser pathogenic” viruses. That is, lesser pathogenic than high-pathogenic.
- It appears that a higher dose may be necessary to fight the “more virulent” high pathogenic strains. A higher dose is also needed to achieve the same protection once time has lapsed from beginning of infection.
The viruses tested came from Vietnam 2004 and Turkey 2006, but no strains from Indonesia or Egypt were included, where partial resistance to Tamiflu may be developing in some isolates.
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Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 2007 Apr;51(4):1414-24. Epub 2007 Feb 12
Efficacy of oseltamivir therapy in ferrets inoculated with different clades of H5N1 influenza virus.
Govorkova EA, Ilyushina NA, Boltz DA, Douglas A, Yilmaz N, Webster RG.
Department of Infectious Diseases, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Department of Pathology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38105-2794, USA.
Highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses have infected an increasing number of humans in Asia, with high mortality rates and the emergence of multiple distinguishable clades. It is not known whether antiviral drugs that are effective against contemporary human influenza viruses will be effective against systemically replicating viruses, such as these pathogens. Therefore, we evaluated the use of the neuraminidase (NA) inhibitor oseltamivir for early postexposure prophylaxis and for treatment in ferrets exposed to representatives of two clades of H5N1 virus with markedly different pathogenicities in ferrets. Ferrets were protected from lethal infection with the A/Vietnam/1203/04 (H5N1) virus by oseltamivir (5 mg/kg of body weight/day) given 4 h after virus inoculation, but higher daily doses (25 mg/kg) were required for treatment when it was initiated 24 h after virus inoculation. For the treatment of ferrets inoculated with the less pathogenic A/Turkey/15/06 (H5N1) virus, 10 mg/kg/day of oseltamivir was sufficient to reduce the lethargy of the animals, significantly inhibit inflammation in the upper respiratory tract, and block virus spread to the internal organs. Importantly, all ferrets that survived the initial infection were rechallenged with homologous virus after 21 days and were completely protected from infection. Direct sequencing of the NA or HA1 gene segments in viruses isolated from ferret after treatment showed no amino acid substitutions known to cause drug resistance in conserved residues. Thus, early oseltamivir treatment is crucial for protection against highly pathogenic H5N1 viruses and the higher dose may be needed for the treatment of more virulent viruses.
PMID: 17296744 (enter at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez)