People wearing surgical masks; travel advisories; schools closing in fear of outbreaks.
These scenes play nightly on TV screens since the World Health Organization (WHO) started warning people of the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, last month.
And last week the first confirmed case in the Okanagan Valley was reported.
On April 29, a Vernon school child was diagnosed with the virus and the elementary school the student attended was closed as a precaution.
The child, who had been on a trip to Mexico, appears to be recovering well, but the provincial Education Ministry made the decision to close the school for one week.
School District 53 superintendent Juleen McElgunn, said that staff and teachers in the South Okanagan are on a high level of awareness and are in almost daily contact with the health authorities to be sure they have the most up-to-date information on this outbreak.
When asked what would happen if a case were discovered locally, she responded, “We take our direction from Interior Health to provide guidance for what is in the best interests of everyone’s health.”
As of May 1, 13 countries reported confirmed cases of the flu and 39 cases have been confirmed in B.C. with those numbers expected to continue to rise.
Lannea Parfitt, a public health communications officer for Interior Health, said this strain of flu has crossed more than two international borders and is at phase five on the WHO’s risk-of-pandemic scale.
It will not be called a pandemic until it reaches the highest rating, a level six.
According to WHO, level six is a virus classed as a global threat, something that happens three to four times on average every 100 years.
The Interior Health Authority is treating this flu as a novel virus, Parfitt said, because it is a new strain of flu.
The B.C. Health Ministry reports that it can be spread from person to person, but how fast it travels is yet to be determined.
There is no vaccine to protect people from the swine flu, but professionals are working on developing one.
Although it is called a swine flu, there are no dangers from eating properly cooked pork, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, but it is a virus strain found in pigs and can be passed to humans as a respiratory illness.
The current outbreak began in Mexico, and some cruise ships and airlines have reduced their services to that country.
However, there is no ban on travel and Joe Sardinha, president of the BC Fruit Growers Association, said he expects that this flu will not affect the foreign workers program that brings agricultural workers to the South Okanagan.
Every season, hundreds of agricultural workers from Mexico travel to the Okanagan to work in orchards.
Most of them fly out of Mexico City, Sardinha said, which he referred to as the “ground zero for the outbreak.”
However, each of the workers has to pass a full medical examination before being accepted into the program.
Sardinha said most of those examinations took place before the outbreak, but as a precaution, authorities from Mexico are at the airports asking people to complete health questionnaires.
As well, there are doctors who will be doing checks to find anyone who may be running a fever, Sardinha said, but so far nothing has interrupted the flow of Mexican workers into the province.
Even though this strain of virus may lead to a pandemic, it does not mean that the population needs to panic.
According to the general information posted by the Public Health Agency of Canada, pandemics do not necessarily mean that the illness itself is severe.
It simply means it is widespread.
Although there have been deaths reported, generally the swine flu is not a particularly virulent flu so far.
Daily updates from Public Health can be found on the website http://www.gov.bc.ca by clicking the link: “fight the flu.”

By Diane Zorn
Special to the Osoyoos Times