U.S. health workers worry about swine flu vaccine

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Health department staffers scrambling to answer 100 calls a day. Harried hospital workers rushing to swab hundreds of sore throats. Out of practice school nurses learning how to give vaccines all over again.

City and state health department officials from across the United States say that while the H1N1 swine flu pandemic may be mild in terms of mortality rates, it is killing them in terms of workload.

And they are dreading the task of vaccinating tens of millions of people against the new virus beginning in October.

"We do not have the resources we need and we haven't for a while," Dr Jeffrey Duchin of Public Health in Seattle & King County and the University of Washington said in an interview.

"The problem is we don't have a coordinated healthcare system in this country. We don't have a national framework that allows these interventions."

Duchin said the first wave of the pandemic, which swept across the United States in May and June, is just a foretaste of an unpleasant autumn flu season.

"We needed over 200 staff and 40 volunteers for our outbreak response," he told a meeting of flu experts sponsored by the Institute of Medicine this week. The office was receiving 100 calls a day with reports of cases and requests for testing.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization gave up keeping a precise tally of H1N1 cases, saying merely that there have been more than a million in the United States alone.