Sunday, May 03, 2009
When Woodway resident Jane Hall thinks about swine flu, her thoughts sometimes drift back to 1976.
That’s when she and other nurses who worked for the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District were armed with pneumatic injector guns and given the task of inoculating local residents against the illness at places ranging from churches to veterans’ halls.
Yes, there was a vaccine for the swine flu. But the strain that gave the nation a scare three decades ago is different than the one sickening people today, meaning the vaccine used then wouldn’t offer any protection now.
However, the public health campaign organized around the vaccine may offer a peek at what the nation will undergo this fall, once a vaccine for the current strain is developed.
“It was a huge thing,” Hall said of the effort. “When we gave shots at the convention center; we had huge lines formed.”
Across the country, mass vaccination campaigns targeting swine flu began in October 1976. Then-President Gerald Ford had authorized $135 million — about $505 million in today’s dollars — to pay for enough vaccine for every American. The effort was considered the most extensive effort in preventive medicine ever undertaken.
Ford acted after swine flu killed one soldier and sickened hundreds more at Fort Dix, N.J., in the spring of 1975. Government officials were worried because the strain had previously not been seen before. Even more concerning, it shared some of the characteristics as the 1918 flu virus that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
The reason inoculations weren’t given sooner back then is the same reason as today — it took months to develop and then manufacture the doses.
In McLennan County, vaccination clinics were held everywhere from a veterans’ hall in Mart to a church in West, according to Tribune-Herald articles written at the time.
The biggest clinics were those Hall recalls at the Waco Convention Center. Nurses and doctors who didn’t work at the health district pitched in to give the shots.
Luckily, the injector guns speeded up the process considerably, Hall said. They don’t require needles, which can be time-consuming because they must be changed for each patient.
Hall said she can’t recall how many local residents were vaccinated. But the number was likely sizable; at one of the convention center clinics, for example, 400 people per hour were vaccinated, the Tribune-Herald reported.
“The community certainly came together,” Hall said.
Nationwide, about 40 million people received the vaccine. The government’s original goal was for 117 million people to be inoculated by the end of that November. But problems with the vaccine short-circuited the process.
The most serious problem was people contracting Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease. There also were reports of people having heart attacks soon after getting the shot, but government officials said old age or poor health were to blame in those instances, not the shots.
The government has since changed the way it tests new vaccines because of the problems.
Longtime Waco pediatrician Dr. Charles Gamble said it is too bad the vaccine ended up hurting some people instead of helping them. He said he remembers giving the shots to patients, although they were not as concerned about a potential epidemic as patients today seem to be. That’s likely because people were not bombarded by as much information about the illness back then, he said.
“There is so much now on the TV and Internet,” he said.
As it turned out, the 1976 strain proved not to be a major threat. The soldier from Fort Dix was the only recorded death.
“Flu season came and went, and it didn’t mature as expected,” Hall said. “It was a false alarm.”
Still, the current situation is unnerving, Hall said. She has sat in many training sessions where pandemic illnesses were discussed and now it seems as though some of those scenarios could come to fruition, she said.
The best advice Hall said she could give is what she told patients three decades ago.
“Everybody needs not to panic and wash their hands,” she said.
cculp@wacotrib.com
757-5744
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