FORKS — While it hasn’t hit the North Olympic Peninsula — or even the state — health officials here are keeping a watchful eye on a strain of influenza that caused the Hong Kong pandemic of 1968, the region’s public health officer told the Clallam County Board of Health last week.
Dr. Tom Locke, public health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties, said the H3N2 swine flu is “something worth tracking real closely.”
“We actually ended up putting out some advisories for county fairs to be watching for a new form of swine flu,” Locke told the health board in a meeting in Forks on Tuesday.
“It’s in the same category of the last pandemic string. The H1N1 that caused a fortunately very mild pandemic in 2009 is in this category called triple assortment influenza viruses, where it’s a combination of swine, bird and human influenza viruses all mixed together, usually in pigs.”
Sick pigs can spread the airborne disease to humans, and right now the H3N2 strain is going “back and forth from pigs to humans,” Locke said.
“Where we get worried is when it’s a robust enough virus that it goes from pig to humans, and then human to human,” he said.
“So we were concerned about people at fairs.”
No illnesses have been reported from the Clallam or Jefferson county fairs last month.
Most of the recent cases have been reported in Indiana, Locke said.
The Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million worldwide in 1968 and 1969.
“It caused a pandemic in 1968, and then sometime in the ’90s it went into the swine population,” Locke said.
“It’s been circulating and mutating, and if it gets better at person-to-person transmission then we have the makings of the next pandemic.”
“So we’re just in a monitoring mode on that right now, but no Washington cases.”
On a brighter note, Locke said the declared pertussis epidemic in Washington is finally winding down.
“We’re still seeing confirmed cases, but not at near the instances that we were earlier in the year,” he said.
“We continue to aggressively promote vaccination among adults and adolescents.”
Pertussis, or whooping cough, can make children and babies very sick and can be fatal in rare cases.
The state Department of Health reported 4,115 confirmed pertussis cases from Jan. 1 to Sept. 15, compared to 427 in the first 81/2 months of 2011.
The North Olympic Peninsula accounted for 51 of this year’s cases: 26 in Clallam County and 25 in Jefferson County, most of which happened last winter and spring.
State health officials have now confirmed that the Tdap pertussis vaccination doesn’t last as long as its predecessor.
About 75 percent of the children with confirmed whooping cough cases in Washington were fully vaccinated, but with a newer, lower-side-effect cellular vaccine, Locke said.
“We’re going to need to vaccinate these kids more frequently,” Locke said.
“And we would also welcome a better vaccine, a vaccine that has more staying power. Having to do more frequent vaccinations is a costly and unpopular sort of strategy.”
Locke also addressed the West Nile virus in a briefing on communicable diseases.
Although Washington had just “a couple cases” of West Nile this year, the mosquito-borne virus was prevalent in the South.
“We thought West Nile was sort of yesterday’s news, but it turns out this is the worst year ever in the United States for West Nile, especially in Texas,” Locke said.
“There’s been almost 2,000 confirmed reported cases of human West Nile infection, and this is the tip of the iceberg, remembering that 80 percent of people with West Nile infection don’t have any symptoms, don’t even know they’re sick.”
About one of every 150 West Nile cases leads to a severe disease that causes permanent brain damage and a polio-like syndrome.
State health officials monitor mosquito pools and look for West Nile in horses.
“But we simply don’t know if it’s ever going to be a problem in this state,” Locke said.
Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
