H1N1 vaccine clinics hit by 'pent-up demand'

The federal governmenthas ordered enough H1N1 vaccine for every Canadian,butit's not possibleto provide it to everyone all at once.

Long lineups for the swine flu vaccine continued Tuesday outside clinics in Calgary and Edmonton.

People were facing three-hour waits at a shopping centre in Edmonton and more than three hours at a mall clinic in southeast Calgary.

Outside a clinic in Elmsdale, on the boundary of Hants and Halifax counties in Nova Scotia, the lineup snaked through the parking lot on Tuesday morning.

"We want to get it over with,"said Kathy Mauger, who waited a couple of hours withher three boys."We don't want the kids to miss a lot of school."

Ottawa Public Health also increased staffing after delivering 4,200 inoculationsand then turning away people on opening day.

"There's quite a pent-up demand,"Gavin Wilson, a spokesman for health authority Vancouver Coastal Health, said Monday. "I think people have been hearing about the vaccine for quite a long time now, and it's here and people are eager to get it."

Turnout was higher than expected in the Vancouver area, with one clinic turning people away after administering all of its 350 doses of the vaccine.

Generally, provincial and territorial health officials have asked people in high-risk groups to seek out the H1N1 vaccine first, but said they would not check medical histories before offering the vaccine.

In the United States, some Americans have also waited in long linesfor thepandemic vaccine.

The amount of vaccine available to ship to doctors and clinics in the U.S. has increased to 22.4 million doses from about 14.1 million a week ago,Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Tuesday.

"Were getting to a level where it will be significantly easier to find and receive the vaccine," Frieden said.

U.S.cases

U.S. President Barack Obama has declared swine flu a national emergency, which Frieden called a "pre-emptive move" that offers another tooltohelp health-care workers responding to alarge influx of patients.

On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged people waiting in line for the shots not be discouraged, but saidit was expected that the vaccine would be supplied in waves. She spoke to three national network morning shows.

About 1,000 deaths in the United States have been attributed toswine flu. As of Oct. 22, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported 86 swine fludeaths.

Worldwide, more than 414,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic influenza H1N1 2009 and nearly 5,000 deaths had beenreported to the World Health Organization as of Oct. 17, the UN group said Friday.

On Tuesday, health officials in Toronto confirmedthat a 13-year-oldboy haddied of the virus.

"The burden of disease is in young children,"said Dr. Donald Low, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and the medical director ofOntario's Public Health Laboratories.

In the U.S., which Low said is about four weeks ahead of Ontario in entering the second wave of the pandemic, abouthalf of hospitalized patients and one-quarter of the people dying of H1N1-related causes are under the age of 25.

Manyare teenagers, and about 70 per cent of them have some underlying medical condition such as asthma, muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy.