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April 24, 2009

Outbreak exercise

Flu pandemic exercise held in Cullman

By Trent Moore

Staff Writer

WEST POINT — Lesley Hembree stood at a medical triage checkpoint Friday morning, screaming for her daughter outside the West Point Middle School cafeteria.

A few feet away, a student fainted from flu-like symptoms as health department employees rushed to the young man’s aide.

“Do you have any nausea?” Cullman County Health Department employee Rhonda Abbott asked the boy, as she shuffled through her medical kit. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

This scene, which centered around an emergency point of distribution for influenza shots at the school, was part of a countywide exercise to test local preparedness in the event of an actual flu outbreak. The fictional outbreak scenario was played out all morning, while students and volunteers were randomly given symptom cards informing them of how to act, to test the worker’s response.

“The pandemic began in Atlanta, with a rise in ER visits,” Cullman Health Department emergency preparedness director Candice Adkins said, referring to the fictional scenario. “Now, more than 20 percent of our staff and the general public are infected. We’re giving everyone masks and encouraging everyone to practice social distancing to keep from spreading it.”

A triage area was set up outside the cafeteria, while “flu shots” were given inside the cafeteria.

“We’re really able to learn and see what our shortcoming are by doing this,” state health department employee Blake Weber said of the drill, while processing volunteers acting as unruly parents at the triage checkpoint. “We can learn to communicate better and see where the ups and down are.”

Crystal Page, clinic supervisor at the Cullman County Health Department, said the exercise creates a “live” opportunity for the staff to deal with issues that could arise in the event of a real pandemic.

“We’re really just trying to work out all the little details,” she explained, while also giving directions and answering questions from her on-site staff. “This is a thought process, figuring out what our needs are and seeing things we may not be entirely prepared for ... We’ve already learned that we may need more than one person in charge.”

In the event of a real outbreak, Adkins said similar distribution points would likely be placed all over the county, to reach a larger majority of the population.

“It would depend on exactly what the event really was,” she said. “In a real event, we would probably have a lot of these scenarios going on simultaneously.”

Sondra Nassetta, with the Alabama Department of Public Health, said a major problem faced by the West Point distribution point staff throughout the day was communication.

“Our phones did not work out there, because we didn’t have good service in that area,” she said. “So, to correct that we may have back up two-way radios in the future, or a computer to send e-mails from the site.”

More than 150 people across various agencies were involved with the exercise. Participating agencies included the Cullman County Health Department, the Cullman City Police Department, the Cullman County Sheriff’s Office, county coroner Gary Murphree, Cullman Regional Medical Center and others.



‰ Trent Moore can be reached by e-mail at trentm@cullmantimes.com, or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 225.

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