America's North Shore Journal

Admi­ral Thad Allen, the Com­man­dant of the U.S. Coast Guard has a blog. In a recent post, RADM Mark Tedesco talked about the Coast Guard's readi­ness for pan­demic flu, swine flu or novel H1N1.

In response to this H1N1 out­break, the Coast Guard has released numer­ous ALCOASTs and mes­sages to help pre­pare and pro­tect our Coast Guard fam­ily against this emerg­ing dis­ease. Timely infor­ma­tion on H1N1 can be found on the Coast Guard por­tal. Addi­tion­ally, I broad­casted a series of infor­ma­tive H1N1 web­casts that can be found on the Coast Guard H1N1 web­site. For fam­ily pre­pared­ness, CG-111 has cre­ated a Fam­ily Readi­ness page which has a wealth of resources.

All Coast Guard mem­bers should ensure they have taken the appro­pri­ate Influenza train­ing mod­ules located on E-Learning . These mod­ules focus on influenza aware­ness and pre­ven­tion. Addi­tion­ally, Coast Guard cut­ters that are expe­ri­enc­ing con­nec­tiv­ity issues can use the H1N1 Influenza Pow­er­Point to edu­cate their mem­bers on H1N1 Influenza until they obtain bet­ter con­nec­tiv­ity. Note how­ever this Pow­er­Point is not an alter­na­tive to the cur­rent manda­tory Influenza GMT located on the Coast Guard Learn­ing Portal.

I posed the fol­low­ing ques­tion and he was kind enough to respond:

Q. DoD is report­ing 8 USCG active duty per­son­nel have been diag­nosed with novel H1N1.

Since your peo­ple work so closely in many of the duty sta­tions, how will you han­dle an out­break that affects an entire sta­tion or post? I could fore­see, as an exam­ple, the Rochester NY sta­tion hav­ing enough per­son­nel ill that response would be affected. Are you able to "fill in" for some of these more iso­lated posts, or will there be a short period of time when the mis­sion might be affected?

A. Chuck,

You raise a great point and {we} are plan­ning accord­ingly. We antic­i­pate pro­vid­ing our units guid­ance within the next month on how to deal with a sce­nario like the one you pose.

The guid­ance will be based on the degree of degra­da­tion of per­son­nel readi­ness and dis­cuss pro­ce­dures for back­fill either by real­lo­cat­ing per­son­nel from other units or recall Reserves. It will also dis­cuss risk-based deci­sion mak­ing to repri­or­i­tize mis­sions dur­ing peri­ods of degradation.