Public Health

Flu, what you can do to stay healthy and commencement

May 4, 2009

What you can do to stay healthy

Stay informed. This website will be updated regularly as information becomes available.


• Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people.


Take everyday actions to stay healthy.

    1. Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.


    2. Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.


    3. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.


    4. Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

Follow public health advice regarding school closures, avoiding crowds and other social distancing measures.


Develop a family emergency plan as a precaution. This should include storing a supply of food, medicines, facemasks, alcohol-based hand rubs and other essential supplies.

(From CDC website)

Keeping flu away

The world is preoccupied with a term few people had heard of before a couple weeks ago, A(H1N1). How quickly we learn the new language of fear and contagion. Fortunately, our School has a really skilled All-Hazards Preparedness Committee, and they rallied immediately as soon as it became clear that we needed to react proactively to this global threat. When I say react proactively, what I mean is that our School should respond in the appropriate way, thinking and acting ahead not just waiting for something to happen. For example, we should be prepared to make the right decisions to protect our faculty, students and staff. That means knowing when the School should be open and when it should be closed. It means informing people about what’s happening and how they can protect themselves and others from the virus. Next week, we will start providing hand wipes people can use as an additional protective measure. We should be decisive, proactive and unafraid in dealing with a threat like this and control what can be controlled. As our infectious disease colleagues tell us, a lot is known about influenza viruses.

We also are trying, as acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rich Besser, MD, and others remind us, to keep the risk in perspective. Each year, about 36,000 people in the US die from the flu. It is not a benign disease for some people. We’ve learned to live with the flu, and rarely does the average person think about these deaths, as tragic as they are. Words like pandemic have an ominous sound that frightens people. The word means across the world, thus, now, there are cases around the world, but to many people, it sounds like catastrophically across the world. So far, we have not seen catastrophe. It’s a situation about which we should take prudent, cautious and appropriate action, with attention to the ethical issues involved.

I’ve been really impressed by what David Weber, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and epidemiology  and associate director, UNC School of Medicine, has been doing to both lead the hospital’s response planning and to communicate about the flu. He told us that UNC Hospitals did an amazing job of finalizing a new emergency wing that has special air handling for infectious diseases. It was supposed to be ready in June but opened May 1, a full week early.

Our SPH preparedness center (N.C. Center for Public Health Preparedness), led by Pia MacDonald, PhD, assistant professor, is doing an excellent job around flu issues. And they have deployed our Team Epi-Aid student volunteers to help the state’s Department of Health and Human Services triage calls.

Jeffrey Engel, MD, state health director, NC Department of Health and Human Services, came to the School Friday to meet with us. As health director, he succeeds Leah Devlin, DDS, MPH whom we think the world of. Dr. Engel has the right perspective on this new flu, and seems to be doing an excellent job of leading North Carolina through it. And we are working closely with the Department of Health.

Most people consider the CDC website the most credible source of information about the flu. Our homepage now has a direct link. At the end of this post, I have pasted tips from the CDC website about staying healthy.

There’s been some good writing in the newspapers (which I still read every day in print) about flu. Reading the New York Times story about the first fatal case in Mexico was yet another wake-up call about how lack of access to good health care can be fatal. First, the woman treated herself, with OTC antibiotics and other measures, then, after she saw no improvement, she visited a doctor who gave her antibiotics and sent her away. By the time she finally got to a hospital, she was desperately, hopelessly ill. There was a good article in the Durham Herald-Sun April 30th by Priscilla Wald, PhD, an English professor at Duke and author of the book Contagious. She wrote that the threat of a pandemic is precisely the moment at which we should be thinking about the fact that access to health care is not a luxury, and that lack of access is a global disaster.

I’ve been reading the 1977 IOM report about how the 1976 swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, NJ was handled. It’s a cautionary tale about really bad decision making, about how pride, the lack of an evidence foundation and competition between agencies led to a disastrous set of decisions. As the introduction to the report says, “In the waning days of the flu season, the incoming Secretary of what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Joseph Califano, asked Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg to examine what happened and to extract lessons to help cope with similar situations in the future. The result was their report, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease.”

 Commencement-less than a week away

The campus feels deserted, but the exodus was not apparent. Commencement is less than a week away. I look forward to seeing our graduating students, their families and friends and our faculty and staff.

Happy Monday! Barbara


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The views expressed in this blog are Barbara Rimer’s alone and do not represent the views and policies of The University of North Carolina or the Gillings School.