LEWISTON — The number of absent students at McMahon Elementary School last week was 17 percent, high enough to report to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's down to 9 percent this week, Lewiston school nurse Cathy Liguori said Wednesday. Liguori has overseen the flu vaccine clinics for Lewiston schools.

On Nov. 5 Lewiston High School absenteeism was 15.8 percent, compared to 10 percent on Nov. 10, Liguori said.
As the swine flu spreads across Maine, forcing two schools to close, Lewiston's "are doing great," Liguori said. "Our clinics were at the right time when the surge started."

Lewiston students were offered the vaccine at the beginning of the upswing of the H1N1 outbreak. "I think our clinics made a difference," Liguori said. Lewiston has plenty of sick students, but the number is manageable, she said.

Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine CDC, said that so far, schools that offered the first clinics — Portland, Sanford and Springvale — haven't had outbreaks.

Many schools had to wait for vaccine because of national shortages. But the state's larger schools, including Lewiston, Auburn, Bangor
and Augusta, were offered vaccines available for Oct. 26, Mills said.

Lewiston schools began giving vaccines on Oct. 28 and finished Nov. 4. In Auburn, which is seeing a higher number of students out sick, clinics for middle and high school students were offered in early November. Clinics for elementary students began Nov. 9 and will end on Nov. 17.

"We turned it around as quickly as we could," Auburn Superintendent Tom Morrill said. Auburn reassigned personnel and shifted plans from holding larger clinics at the high schools to delivering vaccines to individual schools.

So far, more than 50 percent of Auburn students are getting the vaccines, Morrill said. Compared to Lewiston, Auburn has fewer school nurses, he said.

School districts with fewer nurses could not respond as swiftly as districts with more, Mills said. Offering all students vaccines and organizing clinics "is a huge management job," Mills said. "The school nurses are really the heroes."

By Nov. 20, 95 percent of Maine schools will have offered vaccines to students, Mills said. After that the spread of swine flu in schools "may very well settle down," Mills said.

After Maine students have been offered the vaccine, it will be offered to preschool children and high-risk adults, she said.

Why Bates got vaccines first

Bates College in Lewiston and Gould Academy in Bethel received large supplies of H1N1 vaccine in October, long before public school students were offered the vaccine.

Mills said that was because the Bates outbreak happened during Columbus Day weekend, before the state was told about the vaccine shortage. "And the Bates outbreak was widespread."

Bates and Gould received preferential treatment because they were residential, which made them higher risks for the disease spreading, Mills said. Containing it at Bates helped protect the Lewiston-Auburn community, she said.

But if those outbreaks were to happen today, Bates would receive less vaccine, and more would be directed to younger students.

bwashuk@sunjournal.com