AUGUSTA – They painted a ghastly picture of Maine in the not-to-distant future, of death and disease and police departments raiding local hospitals for sanitary gloves and face masks.
They talked about closed roads and quarantines and doctors, nurses and EMTs having to choose between staying home with their own sick families or venturing out to treat the dying.
Then, the assembled doctors, hospital executives and emergency planning officials broke into smaller groups to try to figure out a way to keep it from coming true.
“The biggest lesson we learned is that the cure doesn’t come from brick buildings or high-tech machinery,” said August Valenti, an epidemiologist at Maine Medical Center in Portland. “It comes from the community.”
More than 230 officials from hospitals, ambulance companies and emergency agencies around Maine gathered Wednesday in the Augusta Civic Center to plot the state’s response to a looming avian flu pandemic.
They agreed they need a better sense of who’d be in charge. They need planning, they need supplies and they need money. Quarantines and calm will be the best ways to stop the spread of the disease in the early stages, before a vaccine is ready.
“The biggest problem we’re going to have is getting out a single, unified message,” said Gerald Cayer, chief operating officer at Franklin Memorial Hospital. “If we can do that, people will listen and do what they need to do.”
Dramatic reading
The day started with play acting, a dramatic reading by five of the attendees: A strain of the H5N1 flu virus, called the avian flu, had been isolated in a province of China in March 2006. It was the first to spread between people, and thousands were reported stricken.
By March 15, a South Portland pilot who had just returned from China reported symptoms of the disease.
Reports began coming in from all over the state. Within three days, a federal state of emergency had been declared. International and state borders were closed. Shipments of food and heating oil disappeared. Public functions were canceled, children sent home from school and people advised to stay home.
By Memorial Day 2006, 1,500 Mainers were dead. By March 2007, a year after the first outbreak, 2,500 had died, most of them between the ages of 18 and 40.
“Many were parents,” said Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. “Eight hundred children lost at least one parent, and many found themselves orphaned.”
No crystal ball
The exercise was designed to dramatize the state’s data.
“We don’t have a crystal ball,” said Dora Mills, director of the state Bureau of Health. “We don’t know just what will happen.”
They have an idea, however. Mills and her staff have been working on a response to a flu pandemic for several years. They issued a report explaining the state’s role in August and attended a conference in Washington last week to learn about federal plans.
“What we don’t have is an idea of what local groups need,” Mills said. “There’s a sense that emergency management agencies have done their plans. And local hospitals have done a lot, too. But there’s a disconnect there, and it feels spotty.”
She plans to use information from Wednesday’s meeting to draw up a list of needs and problems. Then, she’ll convene local meetings around the state, possibly in March, to fix them.
Officials from Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties said communication is the biggest need at all levels. They need ways to work together, find out what the state wants done and get messages to the public.
“One problem will be surge capacity in the emergency rooms,” said Franklin Memorial’s Cayer. He and Randall Gauvin, emergency preparedness chief at the hospital, said they need to convince the “worried well” – those with colds and mild symptoms – to stay home and not clog the hospitals. They suggested creating phone banks to talk to patients and their families isolated in their homes.
Maine is the first state to bring its emergency and health officials together to start planning for an avian flu outbreak, according to Brian Cresta, regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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