In addition to managing infection hot spots and improving disease containment, Infonaut’s Hospital Watch Live also functions as a safety tool for patient wandering.

The case of patient Wesley Stanko in Lethbridge, Alberta, who went missing and spent three days in a hospital mechanical room before he was found, highlights the importance of better patient monitoring, even within hospital walls.

HWL’s real-time location system (RTLS) technology can track tagged patients to within 30 cm in a hospital environment.

A 55-year-old Lethbridge, Alta., man who was missing in a hospital for three days last summer is no longer able to live independently and has moved to a nursing home.

Wesley Stanko, who has a brain injury and walks with a shuffle, was admitted to the Chinook Regional Hospital in Lethbridge last August after suffering a fall. He wandered away from his hospital room and vanished. Three days later, he was found trapped in a hospital mechanical room.

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Police and staff searched for Wesley Stanko from the time he was lost until he was found, said Penny Knawsny, a Chinook hospital spokesperson.

Watch how Kingston Frontenac Lennox & Addington (KFL&A) Public Health used Infection Watch Live to monitor and manage the 2nd wave of H1N1 in their community.

H1N1 pandemic ending with a whimper, not a bang

With H1N1 poised to enter history as the least deadly of four global flu pandemics, some experts are calling for an end to Canada’s mass vaccination program.

Nature is already achieving what we would hope to achieve by vaccinating, they say.

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The drop in cases suggests Canada has hit the critical fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated to control the pandemic, says Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics.

Fisman can’t understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, fewer than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity.

“I’m sure that the vaccine has prevented some deaths. I’m sure that there are people who are alive right now who would not have been alive if we hadn’t vaccinated,” he says. But the pandemic was already peaking, and then subsiding before the vaccination was rolling out in force.

Full Article: here.

Only 30 per cent of Ontario residents have received H1N1 shot, says top official

Ontario’s top medical official says only 30 per cent of the province’s population has received the H1N1 shot.

The target had been to vaccinate 70 per cent of the population, and Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Arlene King repeated her message Friday that people should not become complacent.

Full Article: here.

Public Health Agency says 48 cases of anaphylaxis reported after H1N1 shots

The Public Health Agency of Canada says there have been 48 cases of a severe allergic reaction reported in people who have had H1N1 shots.

The agency says that was as of the week of Nov. 20, when nearly 12.3 million doses of vaccine had been distributed across the country. The rate of anaphylactic reactions is 0.39 per 100,000 doses, which the agency says doesn’t exceed the normal rate seen for the administration of vaccines.
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One lot of GlaxoSmithKline’s pandemic vaccine was put on hold because it was linked to a higher-than-normal number of cases of anaphylaxis.

The agency says seven of the cases of anaphylaxis were in people who received shots from that batch of vaccine.

Full Article: here.

Kenya to introduce H1N1 vaccine

Kenya will introduce vaccination against the H1N1 influenza virus commonly known as Swine Flu in January after the World Health Organisation (WHO) offered 730,000 doses of the vaccine.

In an exclusive interview with Capital News, the Director of Public Health Dr Shahnaaz Shariff said that Kenya and Togo would be the first African countries to receive the vaccine from WHO which are enough to vaccinate 10 percent of the population.

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“The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada have actually started immunising their citizens against H1N1 and they are also targeting the high risk groups. The difference is they are paying it from their own tax payers’ money but we are getting from the WHO stockpile,” he said.

Full Article: here.

WHO Defends Flu Response Amid Exaggeration Claims

Mortality from the new H1N1 strain is “unquestionably higher” than the death toll reported by national authorities, the Geneva-based agency said in a report seen by Bloomberg News before its scheduled publication today. Deaths totaled more than 7,820 as of Nov. 22, said WHO, which estimates as many as 500,000 people die each year from seasonal strains.

Health authorities worldwide are assessing whether their response to swine flu is justified by its threat as cases of flu-like illness retreat in the U.S. and U.K. While a majority of patients recover within days and reported fatalities are a fraction of the seasonal flu toll, these figures mask the full impact of swine flu on society, WHO said.

“Compared with seasonal influenza, the H1N1 virus affects a much younger age group in all categories — those most frequently infected, hospitalized, requiring intensive care, and dying,” WHO said in the report.

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“If you look at years of personal life lost, it’s much higher, and that’s the point we have to get across,” Osterholm said in a telephone interview today. “A death in an otherwise healthy 24-year-old, to me, is a major defeat for society.”

Full Article: here.

Still too early to declare swine flu pandemic over: WHO

It is too soon to decide whether to declare the H1N1 pandemic over, World Health Organization officials said Thursday.

While the number of infections and deaths are falling in Canada and the U.S., “that’s still not true for the entire Northern Hemisphere,” and it is impossible to know now whether the spring will bring a third wave of infection, Dr. Feiji Fukuda, special adviser to the WHO director-general on pandemic influenza said in a press briefing.

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“Overall, it’s too early to say whether activity is peaking in the Northern Hemisphere, and, at this point, it is also not possible to predict what we are going to be seeing in the spring time.”

And while new estimates suggest H1N1 is, overall, no more deadly than regular seasonal influenza, Dr. Fukuda warned that it is premature to declare how H1N1 will stack up against past pandemics.

The WHO says swine flu pandemic is milder than expected, may be nearing peak

Fukuda acknowledged that the virus has proved less lethal than authorities originally feared. “It is possible there could be unexpected events which occur as we go through” the pandemic, he said. But “it is quite possible to have a pandemic on the milder side and if we are experiencing that, and if the number of serious cases is kept down … this is something for which we should all be thankful.”

Fukuda said that more than 150 million doses of swine flu vaccine have now been distributed in about 40 countries. The United States, with at least 70 million doses, represents nearly half that total.

He also said that, so far, researchers have identified 96 patients with strains of the swine flu virus that are resistant to the most commonly used antiviral agent, Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir.

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New data from college campuses support the idea that swine flu may have passed its peak in the United States. For the week ending Nov. 27, there were only 1,076 new cases of influenza-like illnesses, generally presumed to be swine flu, among the nearly 3 million students covered in the survey, a 69% drop from the previous week.

Top doctor pleads for Canadians to get H1N1 vaccine

H1N1 may have hit its peak but the risk of transmission remains high and millions of Canadians could still be infected, Canada’s top doctor warned Wednesday in pleading for Canadians to get vaccinated.

“Even if you are not personally worried about getting H1N1, for the sake of others around you, as well as your loved ones, please get your H1N1 flu shot,” said Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health officer.

Full Article: here.

International Study of the Prevalence and Outcomes of Infection in Intensive Care Units

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has taken a one-day snapshot of the number of infected patients in ICUs worldwide — and the results are not good.

Of the tens of thousands of patients surveyed, at over a thousand hospitals, in over 75 countries, more than 50% were considered infected.

The patients who had been in the ICU the longest (prior to the study day) had higher rates of infection “especially infections due to resistant staphylococci, Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas species, and Candida species”.

“The ICU mortality rate of infected patients was more than twice that of noninfected patients… as was the hospital mortality rate”.

JAMA’s conclusions? “Infections are common in patients in contemporary ICUs, and risk of infection increases with duration of ICU stay. In this large cohort, infection was independently associated with an increased risk of hospital death.”

Abstract here.

CBC coverage here.