Winnebago County Health Department to test health emergency scenario

June 5th, 2008 at 05:49am Deborah Austin

On June 13, the Winnebago County Health Department will be testing its Emergency Operations Plan with an exercise involving about 30 local agencies.  The department has done about four such exercises in the past two years, said Emergency Response Coordinator Dan Reilly.

The Emergency Operations Plan was created to provide a coordinated response of county government and community in the event of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack, Reilly said.

Each of the exercises is done according to an “incident action plan” to simulate a specific response to a specific problem, he said. “For example, if we had a smallpox breakout, that would require a mass vaccination. But if we had an anthrax attack, that would require a specific medication distribution.

“The Centers for Disease Control says that in the event of certain types of infectious disease, we’d need to vaccinate everyone in the county within 48 hours.”

The June 13 exercise will test a scenario involving an infectious agent, Reilly said.  The specific agent will not be revealed until the start of the exercise. The simulation will provide advanced vaccination training — a technique that is a bit different from normal vaccinations — at a mass vaccination site. “We’ll be sending all the Health Department people through it so they know what it looks like, as well as people from area agencies,” he said. Those agencies include all local hospitals, law enforcement agencies and fire departments, major employers and the Rock River Valley Blood Center as well as other entities, Reilly said.

The Health Department also wants to include nursing students, pharmacists and veterinarians in this exercise, Reilly said, “people you wouldn’t normally think of. We’d like to have a pool of semi-trained people so that if something would happen, we could get them trained really quickly and send them out.”

The department expects about 300 people to participate in the exercise.

For more information on participating, call Dan Reilly at 815-720-4217 or e-mail dreilly@wchd.org. The deadline for signing up to participate in the exercise is 5 p.m. on Wednesday, June 11.

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