Tracking swine flu at Texas military bases

ShareThis

Nurse practitioner Kathy Hagerman knew something wasn't normal when two teens at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas came to the clinic in mid-April with high fevers. Turns out, the two 16-year-old boys were among the first in the nation to have contracted swine flu.
Identified as military dependents who attend high school in Cibolo, Texas, both had been running fevers of 102 degrees to 103 degrees for four or five days before coming in to the clinic, Hagerman said.
Their fevers, coughs, sore throats and assorted aches were definitely flu-like symptoms, but the timing was wrong.
"It was past the normal flu season, so I wanted to see what was going on, if they really were having flu," she said in a telephone interview.
Medical workers wasted no time in submitting a sample to the flu surveillance program down the road at the Brooks City-Base in San Antonio, an affiliate of the Air Force.
The Defense Department's Worldwide Influenza Surveillance Program, at Brooks since 1976, exists to identify flu outbreaks, replied Joe Wiggins, a Brooks City-Base spokesman, in an e-mail.
It's role in this outbreak is to ramp up testing to meet demand and provide laboratory and epidemiological expertise, Wiggins wrote. The program also routinely shares information with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
For the teens at Randolph, both military dependents, it was bed rest, fluids and home -- away from other people who could catch whatever it was they had, according to an American Forces Press Services story.
The lab for the flu surveillance program zeroed in on the type of flu the teens had -- influenza A. But officials couldn't specifically identify it as H1N1.
So they flew the samples to the CDC in Atlanta for confirmation.
The boys didn't suffer severe cases of swine flu because they had no complications, Hagerman said.
It remains a mystery how they contracted H1N1 in spite of efforts to find out, Col. Soledad Lindo-Moon, commander of the 12th Medical Group at Randolph, said in a telephone interview.
But once base officials received confirmation of swine flu, they put a plan into action that included creating a separate area to treat patients with flu-like symptoms, isolating them from others.
"It's imperative that we do slow down the spread of this disease that's occurring within our community, and so that's why we took those measures," Lindo-Moon said.
Business continues as usual on base although the clinic is handling more patients than average, said Lt. Col. Gregory York, deputy commander of the 12th Medical Group at Randolph.
At first, they were simply "hyped" about the swine flu, York said. But later patients have been exhibiting significant flu-like symptoms.
Base schools remain open since the two teens went to an off-base high school.
But students aren't allowed to go to on-base campuses if their brothers or sisters attend off-base schools that were closed because of swine flu.
Lindo-Moon said she wasn't sure how many additional samples Randolph has sent to the flu surveillance program. She's expecting to hear back soon from the lab, now inundated with samples.
The Navy also played a role in uncovering the flu's existence in the United States. Five days before the news broke April 21 in the United States about the outbreak of swine flu, Navy scientists in San Diego got word from the CDC that a 10-year-old boy who was part of a research program tested positive for flu that originated in Mexico.
The youth was a subject of a Naval Health Research Center study of a new flu diagnostic test. When the child's test result showed an unfamiliar subtype of the influenza virus, the scientists sent the specimen to the CDC, which confirmed it as H1N1.
As of Friday, the military flu tracking program has reported at least 13 confirmed cases and more than 20 probable ones. No deaths or serious illnesses have been reported.
They include a 42-year-old serviceman at Brooks City-Base, a 21-year-old serviceman and a 4-year-old girl who is a military dependent, both at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

(E-mail Trish Choate of Scripps Howard News Service at choatet(at)shns.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)