Swine flu didn’t hit the 3,700-student Burlington, Vt., school district until just before the most recent school year ended—but fearful parents still considered pulling their children from classes with a day or two to go, recalls Superintendent Jeanne Collins.
Now, thanks to new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ms. Collins and other school administrators have clear directions for how to handle the cases of H1N1 flu virus that are all but certain to appear in schools this fall. First among them: Closing school is not always necessary.
The Atlanta-based CDC now believes this strain of flu is comparable in severity to what schools would encounter with a typical seasonal flu, which does not usually force school closures. In most cases, students and employees can return to school when they’ve been fever-free for 24 hours, according to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the CDC’s director.
The guidelines also stress personal hygiene as a prevention measure and recognize that local officials may decide to close if high numbers of absentees make staying open impractical.
Such advice is likely to be welcomed by district administrators, who were forced to make decisions last spring on how to respond to H1N1 cases even as federal health officials were working to get a handle on how much of a threat the flu strain posed. ("Swine Flu Disruption Has School Officials Looking for Lessons," May 13, 2009.)
Some early cases of the H1N1 flu in the United States were clustered in schools. There were also concerns that young people were particularly susceptible to the illness.
But federal experts have come to believe that school closures are a less effective control measure and, though young people are more susceptible to the illness, their symptoms are generally mild.
“The more that we can get guidance in writing from the CDC, the more we can allay the fears of parents,” Ms. Collins said.
The latest guidance was released during an Aug. 7 news conference in Washington that included Dr. Frieden as well as the secretaries of education, health and human services, and homeland security. The point that federal officials were trying to get across, they said, is that the government is speaking in a united voice on the topic.
Though decisions to close schools are made at the local level, “it is now clear the closure of schools is rarely indicated, even if H1N1 is in the schools,” said Dr. Frieden, who before his CDC appointment in May, was the health commissioner in New York City. That city’s school system saw thousands of swine flu cases last school year and, in some situations, closed schools. “Maybe we would have closed fewer if we knew what we know now,” he said.
The widow of a New York City assistant principal who died after contracting the H1N1 flu virus has announced her intention to file a $40 million wrongful death suit, saying that the city didn’t control the outbreak and didn’t let her husband know that he had come into contact with people who had tested positive for swine flu.
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Copyright 2009 by Editorial Projects in Education. All rights reserved.
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