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medpundit |
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Saturday, December 28, 2002And it's not as if the public health departments can give out smallpox vaccinations the same way they distribute flu vaccines. The need for pre-vaccination screening, the need for appropriate training of personnel in both vaccine delivery and delivery of informed consent to the patients, the real but remote chance of infecting others, and the pressure the federal government is putting on public health departments to get the vaccines distributed within 3 weeks beginning at the end of January, would necessitate a far more elaborate, more structured and, yes, more expensive system be put in place. Three weeks isn't much time to implement any program, that's true. And their inability to do that with advance notice only drives home the impossibility of a post-attack vaccination plan. However, administering the vaccine shouldn't be as expensive as it's been made out to be by the media. It doesn't take that much time to get an appropriate history from a potential vaccination recipient, and it doesn't require much skill. The Red Cross does this sort of screening at their blood drives all the time. Nor is the administration of the vaccination a difficult skill to learn. It will take money to test people for HIV and other immunodeficiencies, but I don't think it will take the millions to billions the Post article was claiming. There's a very real reluctance among the public health community to trust community-based physicians to administer the shots. That's understandable in the current approach that limits the vaccine to a chosen few. The vaccine has storage limitations that make it difficult to keep on hand unless a lot of it will be used in a short time. But, if public health officials are reluctant to assume the responsibility of certifying the health of vaccine recipients, they could simply require that a potential recipient's primary care physician vouch for it. Such a statement isn't unheard of. I routinely have to certify the health of my patients for third parties - for adoption agencies, daycare centers, and life insurance companies, with the patient's consent, of course. That would relieve the public health departments of the need to do extensive screening. Public health departments don't have to go this alone. They can, and should, enlist the help of community physicians. It would make their task a whole lot easier. posted by Sydney on 12/28/2002 05:34:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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