H1N1 crisis deepens

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Spreading his hands, Ron Evans, flanked by (from left) chiefs Gilbert Andrews, Sheldon Kent and David Harper, calls on governments to offer more help. (TREVOR.HAGAN@FREEPRESS.MB.CA)

WINNIPEG — The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has declared a state of emergency over the H1N1 flu pandemic, a move it hopes will rattle the cages of the province and the federal government and cause them to spring into action to combat the potentially deadly virus.

AMC Grand Chief Ron Evans said he and his fellow chiefs want to ensure government officials are fully aware of the devastating impact the H1N1 virus is having in their communities throughout the province.

"The governments need to step up. There is no plan in place. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for First Nations. There is very little combatting the H1N1 pandemic. Our people are sick," Evans said at a press conference at the AMC's downtown headquarters Wednesday.

The AMC's desperate call for action came as the province announced the number of confirmed H1N1 cases in Manitoba jumped by 163, bringing the total to 458. As of Monday, 37 patients with the most severe flu-like symptoms have been put on ventilators in intensive care units.

Evans and 11 other chiefs decried the province's inability to complete even the most simple of tasks on a timely basis -- getting hand sanitizers into the communities that needed them -- describing it as "a political and bureaucratic nightmare."

Part of the problem is that commonly used hand sanitizer products can contain upward of 60 per cent alcohol and there was concern among health officials as well as some First Nations chiefs, that the sanitizers could be misused for intoxication.

Anne-Marie Robinson, assistant deputy minister of Health Canada's First Nations and Inuit health branch, told a Senate committee of discussions between chiefs and public health officials about sending alcohol-based products into communities with addiction problems because there have been "rare" cases where it has been problematic. Robinson would not disclose which reserves had been involved in the discussions and never linked the talks with the "difficulty" she acknowledged was experienced in getting hand sanitizer to some of the chiefs who had asked for it.

David Harper, chief of the Garden Hill First Nation, which is located about 600 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg on Island Lake, said he has heard before of people ingesting hand sanitizer to get intoxicated and that his own band council talked about the alcohol-based products because Garden Hill is a dry reserve where alcohol isn't allowed. He said they quickly identified alternative products and there's no excuse for the delay in getting supplies to Garden Hill when so many people were getting sick.

Harper said he waited for more than two weeks for hand sanitizer and other supplies to arrive, by which point he had already purchased $15,000 worth of merchandise.

A shipment of 2,500 bottles of sanitizer did arrive in Garden Hill last week from the federal government -- they were alcohol-based. Some has been distributed to families and some of the stock is being kept at the school and a police station. Harper said the federal government has shown a willingness to get off its wallet when it comes to other catastrophes in the past. For example, it doled out $425 million in aid after southeast Asia was hit by a tsunami in 2004 and it partnered with the province to bail out Manitoba hog producers, who have been suffering an economic backlash because H1N1 was originally called "swine flu," with another $37.7 million. Harper said aboriginal leaders would welcome Canadian soldiers with open arms if the federal government opts to deploy them to reserves to help fight H1N1.

"If Canadian forces are being sent all over the world to help out, why not in our communities? We need help," he said.

Health Minister Theresa Oswald said the province didn't have a specific response to the AMC's plea because it has effectively been in a state of emergency since April. The province calls it incident command status, instead.

Oswald said she and members of the province's health incident command team have taken a number of measures to deal with the pandemic, including invoking an emergency provision in the collective agreements of doctors and nurses to reassign them where they're needed, postponing elective surgeries to build capacity in the hospital system for intensive care patients and having First Nations leaders participate directly in its pandemic response structure.

Oswald said she spoke to Evans Wednesday afternoon and asked for a list of areas where the province hasn't delivered and he wasn't able to provide any specific shortcomings.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 25, 2009 A3