SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Government officials and health care professionals have found that the prompt immunization campaign cut short the progress of the H1N1 outbreak in the territory, according to Wanda White, manager of the health protection unit and public health nurse.

Amy Lea gets ready to receive a seasonal flu shot from Laurie Parton, manager of Public Health, at the Jan Stirling Building late last year. - NNSL file photo

A year ago last spring, the territory, as with the rest of the country, experienced its first wave of the H1N1 flu virus. By last fall, the NWT was "badly hit" by the disease's second wave, said White. But she added the outbreak was cut short by what is believed to be the largest immunization campaign in the history of this country. Some 62 per cent of the territory's residents were immunized against H1N1, the second highest level in the country, behind only Newfoundland and Labrador.

"We think it would have been fairly bad" had people not been immunized, White said. "Our activity was picking up just as we got the vaccine. As soon as we started to administer the vaccine, the cases went down. Within a week, we saw a big difference in the number of cases."

White made the comments during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs from April 24 to May 1 this year. She added she has seen immunization saving lives, this year's awareness week theme.

"Vaccines are necessary across your lifetime. It doesn't matter if you're nine months old or 90-years-old, you may need a vaccine," she said.

In generations past, children died from vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, meningitis and diphtheria, said White, a fact rarely seen today in developed countries. But young people today don't see the effects of those disease, she added, except when an un-immunized child dies from meningitis, for instance. In those cases, the worry and concern increase among the public, she said.

"I think people realize to a degree but I think we are a victim of our own success," she said.

At 86 per cent, the NWT's immunization coverage rate for infants to seven-year-old children is higher than Canada's at 72 per cent.

Statistics are typically compiled for children when they are vaccinated against about a dozen diseases as part of large-scale vaccination programs - but figures are not kept for adults, whose vaccinations are voluntary.

White said children's vaccination rates are high in the territory "because we have a strong public health system that certainly gets the information out there about immunization. And we certainly have a lot of support from the aboriginal leadership and from others to support immunization programs."