KU Med passes on first round of inoculations

Some health officials hesitant about risky smallpox vaccine

? News of President Bush’s program to inoculate some military forces and, on a voluntary basis, health-care and emergency-response workers against smallpox has sent hospitals in Missouri and Kansas scrambling to devise their own inoculation plans.

But some hospital and public-health officials in Missouri and Kansas said they would be hesitant to participate in the potentially risky inoculations until they received more information from state health officials. Concerns stem from the vaccine’s rare but serious side effects.

KU Med, which has done extensive planning for a bioterrorism crisis, said Friday it would not offer vaccinations immediately to employees.

“In assessing the risk and benefits at this point in time, a lot of information is still coming out,” said Dr. William Barkman, chief of staff at the hospital. “We think the benefit would be to wait and review it.”

If an emergency occurred, the hospital could proceed within a day to vaccinate workers, Barkman said.

He said the hospital was concerned about the theoretical possibility that vaccinated hospital workers could pose a smallpox threat to the hospital’s many cancer and burn patients with lowered immune systems.

“We thought at this point we would pass on the first go-around,” he said. “We just want a little more information.”

That information is forthcoming, said state health officials in Missouri and Kansas.

The Missouri Health Department’s Center for Emergency Response and Terrorism sent letters to 120 hospitals statewide this week. The letters contained guidelines for identifying workers and asked officials to send responses by Jan. 7.

Becky Miller, a vice president of the Missouri Hospital Assn., said no hospitals had responded yet. But she hadn’t heard of any hospitals that planned not to participate.

Missouri expects to vaccinate 6,000 to 8,000 hospital and public-heath workers, Miller said. In addition, about 40 Missouri state health investigators and lab workers would be inoculated so they could be dispatched to rural areas with fewer medical personnel in the case of a smallpox infection.

In Kansas, state bioterrorism specialists plan to vaccinate 3,000 to 4,000 health-care workers – some at hospitals, others on response teams that would investigate a smallpox incident. As in Missouri, only volunteers who undergo a medical screening would participate.