Georgia won't test all type-A flu patients for H1N1: TOO MANY

Georgia Won't Test All Type-A Flu Patients for H1N1 Virus
[link to www.11alive.com]
CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- His patient: a 16 year old girl.

"And we did a Rapid Flu Test on her, and she was positive for Type A."

That was Friday afternoon.

Dr. Richard Young of Cartersville immediately called the phone number that the state Department of Human Services had given him to order up a test, to find out if his patient has the H1N1 virus.

"Called the number. Nobody answered."

He and his nurse kept calling, and called five or six other phone numbers, with no success -- from county health departments (he found out, for example, that the Cobb County Health Department closed at 2:00 pm on Friday) to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Someone from the CDC told him to call the Fulton County Health Department.

Someone from Fulton County finally, by late Friday afternoon, with his young patient and her mother still sitting in his waiting room waiting for information, told him to forget it -- the rules had just changed on Friday. No one would test his patient. Because she's not considered high risk.

Dr. Young didn't know -- while he was calling everyone he could think of to get an H1N1 test for his patient -- that the head of the state division of public health, Dr. Sandra Elizabeth Ford, was on a conference call from her downtown Atlanta office with reporters, telling them that doctors and hospitals from all over Georgia have been sending samples to the state -- specimens -- from their patients who, they fear, are infected with the H1N1 virus.

She said so many have been arriving, she did not know how many. "We're receiving the specimens from all over." She said the state cannot test them all.

She's now testing only the specimens from patients she considers high risk -- such as patients who have just come from Mexico.

"When a hospital [or a doctor] sends us a specimen, we decide if it meets the criteria. If we forward any to the CDC, that means we consider them suspicious of H1N1."

The state has agreed to test 70 specimens, so far, from high risk flu patients across the state.

Most of the patients, 50 of them, were not infected with H1V1 virus.

One patient did test positive, (the woman who is now in a hospital in LaGrange, Georgia).

And the specimens from the remaining 19 patients are still being tested, to determine if any are considered suspicious enough to send to the CDC for a definitive test.

"The median age for this illness is 17," Dr. Ford said.

Dr. Young said he's happy those 70 patients will know, one way or the other.

But he hated having to tell his 16 year old patient and her mother that he was not able to give them the information they wanted about her flu.

"We don't know for sure whether she has it [H1N1] or not. I don't think we'll ever know how many are out there [across Georgia] if we're just going to go on the Rapid Flu Test and not try to prove it."