By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — With a stockpile of antiviral drugs and a pandemic response plan in place, Arkansas is well prepared for the possibility of a swine flu outbreak, Gov. Mike Beebe said Tuesday.
No cases of the swine flu have been confirmed in Arkansas, but health officials have said the virus is likely to reach the state sooner or later. Beebe told reporters the state is “pretty prepared.”
The state Health Department has a stockpile of antiviral medicine that can be used to treat the virus, and more medicine is on the way, Beebe said. Also, officials who would respond to an outbreak have been preparing for that possibility for some time, he said.
“We’ve actually practiced earthquakes and pandemics in addition to practicing such things as tornadoes and floods and ice storms,” Beebe said. “The various agencies that have varying responsibilities have done table exercises to try to simulate (a pandemic).
“Now, do you anticipate everything? Nobody ever does. But they’re about as well-trained as we can make them for any eventuality.”
Health Department spokesman Ed Barham said the state has stockpiled enough of the antiviral drug Tamiflu to treat 286,000 people, which was determined to be the amount needed to treat Arkansans who provide essential services such as health care and utilities.
On Monday, the Health Department ordered another 105,000 units of Tamiflu from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The medicine is expected to arrive by May 7, Barham said.
“If all the states order that … it would represent a quarter of the national stockpile, so we would still have a lot left over,” he said.
No vaccine that exists now can prevent swine flu, but the virus does respond to treatment with Tamiflu, Barham said.
“We’re confident that we have enough to keep ourselves in treatment, anyway, for a little while,” he said. “And right now, of course, there are no cases being reported at all.”
Barham also praised the state’s pandemic response plan, which he said officials have been working on for more than a decade.
“We’re very confident in our ability to distribute a vaccine, as soon as we have one, a treatment drug like Tamiflu or an antidote, if it were necessary to get out an antidote in response to a bioterrorism event. Those things are all part of our emergency preparedness plan, and it’s a good one,” he said.
By Tuesday afternoon, 64 cases of swine flu had been confirmed in the U.S., according to the CDC. In Mexico, where the outbreak is centered, about 150 have died from the virus.
The Arkansas Health Department was continuing Tuesday to test culture samples from people with flu-like symptoms, but the department had not yet received any samples that needed to be sent to the CDC for further analysis, Barham said.
