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Alaska has recorded its first likely child fatality from swine flu.

A 10-year-old Fairbanks child has died from symptoms of probable H1N1 or swine flu virus, the state Department of Health and Social Services said.

A school nurse sent the child home around noon on Thursday with flu symptoms and the child was admitted to the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital overnight.

After not responding well to treatment, the child was transported to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage and was pronounced dead late in the evening on Friday. The child was a student of Hunter Elementary School in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.

"The death of any child is particularly tragic, and our sympathies go out to the family," DHSS Commissioner Bill Hogan said in a press release. "Everyone acted quickly to get this child help. Despite this sad outcome, this shows how important school nurses and others on the front lines are to getting people with flu symptoms the help they need."

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the student," said Fairbanks North Star Borough Superintendent of Schools Nancy Wagner.

"Although most people who get H1N1 flu have a mild illness and quick recovery, this death is a sobering reminder that it can be a serious illness," acting state Public Health Director Deborah Erickson said. "We all need to pay attention and do what we can to help reduce the spread of the virus."

The state has advised schools to take the following precautions related to the flu this fall:

•Students and staff should stay home if they are sick•Separate ill students and staff until they can go home•Encourage regular hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette•Encourage routine cleaning of hard surfaces that are frequently touched•Encourage early treatment of high-risk persons
School closure is not recommended at this time unless the number of sick faculty members or students interferes with the school's ability to function. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also recommends that schools provide time for students to wash their hands whenever necessary and make tissues readily available to students and staff.

Unrelated to this case, an infant with pre-existing medical conditions died this past week in Anchorage from complications possibly related to H1N1 flu. State officials are currently investigating this case.

http://www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=11082842

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A 10-year-old Fairbanks boy died in Anchorage Friday night from a suspected case of H1N1, or swine flu, state health officials said.
The boy is the third Alaskan, and the first school-aged child, to die of what appears to be swine flu.

The nurse at Hunter Elementary School in Fairbanks sent the child home from school around noon on Thursday with symptoms of the flu, mainly coughing and chest pain, said Clay Butcher, spokesman for the state health department. The boy was admitted to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital early Friday but did not respond well to treatment, state officials said.

The boy was medevacked to Providence Alaska Medical Center. Doctors pronounced the child dead at about 10:30 p.m. Friday, officials said.

An infant who had additional medical problems died Wednesday in Anchorage from complications possibly related to swine flu. That case is still under investigation. A Fairbanks woman who died July 16 in Washington state counted as Alaska's first death. The woman had underlying health problems.

State health officials were taken aback by how rapidly the disease took the life of the Fairbanks boy and were trying to gather more information. Officials didn't release the child's name. They said they didn't have information on any underlying health conditions he might have had.

"We have talked to people at the Centers for Disease Control, a flu expert there, just today, who said this is an extremely rapid downhill course," said Beth Funk, medical epidemiologist with the state Division of Public Health. But it wasn't unheard-of, she was told.

Secondary bacterial infections can creep in when the influenza virus damages the lining along the throat, the bronchial tree and the lungs, weakening the immune system, Funk said, relaying what the CDC expert said. Those bacterial infections then can kill, though no one yet knows if that's what happened to the boy.

"I know that people are going to be very, very concerned, and we are as well," Funk said. "There is a tendency to react and do things differently. However, we really are not recommending anything different than we have been."

The major public health push is to prevent the virus from spreading, she said.

Health officials recommend that schools:

• Emphasize that students and staff stay home if they are sick.

• Separate ill students and staff from those who are healthy until the sick ones can go home.

• Encourage hand washing and coughing or sneezing into a sleeve or a tissue. Hand sanitizers are also good.

• Encourage routine cleaning of hard surfaces that are frequently touched.

• Encourage people with other health issues to get early medical treatment.

Everyone involved took the boy's illness seriously and got him help quickly, Funk said.

"From the school, through the family, through the providers who were taking care of this child who died last night, they did all of the right things," Funk said. Among other things, the boy received antiviral medication, she said.

A vaccine to control H1N1 is being produced. The first doses are expected to arrive in Alaska by mid-October. The vaccine will go initially to high-priority groups; public health officials are still working out who that will be.

There's no indication that swine flu is especially dangerous but it is expected to infect more people than normally are infected by seasonal flu.

Symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Some people also have reported diarrhea and vomiting.

Across Alaska, there were 460 confirmed cases of H1N1 as of Wednesday. With so many cases, officials now are only testing the most seriously ill people; those with mild symptoms aren't being tested and their cases aren't showing up in the official count.

School officials around the state say they've been vigilant about swine flu. When children or staff members become ill, they are supposed to stay home until they've been fever-free for 24 hours.

"I would say by now we probably have had some cases in every single school but we don't know how many because sometimes parents just keep their children home," said Anchorage School District Superintendent Carol Comeau. "Sometimes parents call and say that they think their children have H1N1. Others call with a specific diagnosis."

When schools reopen in Fairbanks on Tuesday after the Labor Day holiday, counselors will be ready to help anyone grieving the child's death at Hunter Elementary, said Bill Bailey, spokesman for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the student," Fairbanks North Star Borough Superintendent Nancy Wagner said in a written statement. "This is truly a tragic incident and a tragic day for one of our families."


Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.

http://www.adn.com/life/health/story/924273.html

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This was on the Alaska Dept Health and Human Resourses site on Sept 5, 2009 as a new release

http://www.hss.state.ak.us/press/2009/H ... 090509.pdf


regarding the death of the Fairbanks child on Friday night at Anchorage Providence Hospital

This is so sad and frightening for all of us with children that have compromised health situations let alone all of the healthy children of the world.

State health officials confirmed early Sunday that a 10-year-old Fairbanks boy who died in Anchorage on Friday night tested positive for the H1N1 virus, or swine flu.

The child's case is the second confirmed swine flu death for Alaska. A woman from Fairbanks who had underlying health problems was the first; she died in Washington state in July.

Health officials are still awaiting test results for an 11-month-old baby who died in Anchorage last week.

In addition, a second child from Fairbanks was hospitalized last week in Anchorage with swine flu but is recovering, Dr. Dick Mandsager, chief executive of Providence Alaska Medical Center, told Alaska reporters at an H1N1 briefing Sunday afternoon.

Officials didn't know of any connection between the two Fairbanks children but also didn't know where the second child went to school.

The Anchorage baby, who had other medical problems, was hospitalized for much of July and tested positive for H1N1, Beth Funk, a medical epidemiologist for the state Public Health Division, said at the briefing.

The baby recovered well enough to go home, but then fell ill again, returned to the hospital and died there. The baby tested negative for H1N1 during the second hospital admission, but Funk said later that false negative readings are common with the rapid test and health officials are still awaiting results of a definitive viral culture. They also will confer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, she said.

The boy who died Friday had been healthy, and his quick decline concerns professionals. They are checking whether an opportunistic bacterial infection may have invaded his flu-weakened system.

He was sent home by the nurse from Hunter Elementary around noon on Thursday; he had been coughing and had a fever and chest pain, Funk said. His family took him to an urgent care clinic, where he was given a prescription for an anti-viral medicine. But the child continued to worsen. Early Friday, he was admitted to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.

"He became confused and less responsive. His oxygen level in his blood deteriorated," Funk said.

That same day, the boy was flown to Providence Alaska Medical Center. Doctors tried major resuscitative efforts but he died Friday night around 10:30. No one else in his family is ill, officials said.

It's unusual for an otherwise healthy child to die from swine flu, though not unheard of, Funk said.

http://www.adn.com/life/health/story/925220.html

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Officials temporarily closed a village school in the Brooks Range Friday after as many as half the students stayed home sick. It's the first emergency school closure of the year in Alaska, and comes as rural health care providers battle swine flu -- or at least fear of the flu -- across the state. "Right now if you have the flu, you have swine flu," said Department of Health and Social Services spokesman Greg Wilkinson.

Doctors say the swine flu, or the H1N1 virus, has proven no more dangerous than regular flu. It's a relatively mild virus and is now so widespread that the state has stopped trying to track every case. But with the virus linked to three deaths so far in Alaska and vaccinations weeks away, rural school and health officials are taking extra precautions to prevent the spread. The Bethel hospital saw a spike in emergency room visits Thursday and Friday morning, with more than a third of the patients reporting flu-like symptoms, said Donna Bach, spokeswoman for the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp. On Monday, the hospital plans to open a "flu table" where people can pick up fever-reducing medicine, face masks and hand sanitizer.

In the village of Chevak on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the health clinic canceled scheduled appointments to focus on flu patients and avoid exposing healthy people to the virus. Flu reports have since subsided in the village, Bach said. The North Slope Borough School District is cleaning buses with bleach twice a day, said school superintendent Peggy Cowan. In some schools, the district closed open gym to stop the spread of germs. "Slope-wide the incidence of illnesses -- and there's been a diversity of illnesses -- seemed to have peaked last week," Cowan said Friday. That didn't hold true, though, in the Brooks Range village of Anaktuvuk Pass, where as many as half the students didn't show up this week, Cowan said. "Yesterday absenteeism rose sharply and had been at a high level all week. To give students time to recuperate and to prevent the spread of illness, we decided to close the school," she said.

Cowan doesn't know if swine flu is to blame. The local clinic reports more than one illnesses is spreading around town, she said. But the district followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for H1N1 emergency closures, shutting the school down for five calendar days beginning Friday. The H1N1 virus spreads like any seasonal flu -- traveling in sneezes and coughs, said Dr. Beth Funk, a medical epidemiologist for the state Public Health Division. Hand-washing and hygiene can counter the spread, but in rural Alaska not all villages have running water.

There are roughly 50 communities across the state where half the households still have no indoor plumbing, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Last year, a CDC study concluded such towns have higher rates of pneumonia and other serious respiratory tract infections. Alaska is one of 11 states where swine flu is widespread, the CDC reported Friday. The Bering Strait School District in Northwest Alaska saw attendance drop by about 5 percent this fall as schools and clinics tell people to stay home if they're sick, said curriculum director Greg Johnson. "I'd say it's either attributable to flu or fear of the flu," he said. Johnson's 8-year-old daughter missed the first day of school with a high fever. A health aide figured she probably had swine flu, he said.
http://www.adn.com/life/health/story/931955.html

JUNEAU - The Juneau School District reported two additional cases of swine flu among its students, bringing the total number of cases to three as of Friday.

A student at Mendenhall River Community School was reported on Thursday to have the virus, also known as H1N1. It was the first reported case at a local elementary school.

A second case was reported Friday at Floyd Dryden Middle School.

Spokeswoman Kristin Bartlett said the district would review the number of children reported out of school due to flu-like symptoms today, as well as talk with nurses to see if any schools are showing an increase in sickness. All children are not necessarily getting tested for the virus, she said. ....

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/091 ... 2839.shtml

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Praemonitus, Praemunitus..Forewarned is Forearmed.