Hamlet officials in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, say they've stopped waiting for territorial health officials to tell them how to deal with the swine flu pandemic, opting instead to develop their own plan.
Officials in Pangnirtung and other communities say they still have not received any formal communication from the Nunavut Health Department on how to deal with swine flu, even though the H1N1 virus was first confirmed in the territory in late May.
With the possibility that swine flu may hit hard this fall, the community of about 1,300 people has decided not to wait any longer.
'Get organized as best we can'
"Given that lack of direction, we're proceeding at the community level to get organized as best we can," senior administrative officer Ron Mongeau told CBC News on Thursday.
Mongeau said the hamlet has formed a pandemic response committee, which has already met twice. It will meet again Monday.
"We've assigned tasks to each of the committee members to put together basically databases that will help us delineate all the support that's available in the community," he said.
"So that could range from heavy-equipment officers, municipal service drivers, people with radio and TV expertise, [Canadian] Rangers, Junior Rangers вЂ" all of those groups in the community, we're putting together a database of everybody."
Mongeau said concerns about the H1N1 pandemic will likely be a major topic among municipal officials at the Nunavut Association of Municipalities' meeting later this month in Cambridge Bay.
Pandemic plan being updated
As of Wednesday, Nunavut has 496 lab-confirmed cases of swine flu, including one death.
The territorial government does have a pandemic plan, created in 2006. It states that senior health officials must regularly communicate with senior administrators in all of Nunavut's 25 communities when there is a flu outbreak.
The plan also says the government must ensure all communities have specific pandemic flu response plans.
After municipal officials first raised concerns last month that they haven't been informed about the territory's swine flu strategy, health officials said they were updating the pandemic plan.
Premier Eva Aariak, who's meeting with other Canadian premiers this week at the Council of the Federation meeting in Regina, maintains that Nunavut has a good handle on the H1N1 situation.
"In Nunavut, we are well into informing our communities," Aariak said. "We produced updates on the situation on a weekly basis through news releases, and so on."
Mary Simon, president of the national Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, joined other aboriginal leaders in calling on Canada to introduce tougher measures to manage swine flu in Inuit and First Nations communities.
Simon called for a national Inuit-specific plan to deal with swine flu outbreaks in remote Inuit communities, almost all of which are accessible only by air.
