As colleges and universities gear up for the upcoming flu season, there are concerns that students might use the sickness to cry swine.
"It might be a tempting excuse to stay in bed or head out of town with some friends, but I don't know, if I were to actually get sick, then what would I do?" said Salt Lake Community College student Nate Peterson.
Even with the risk of possible abuse, professors at many of the state's institutions are being encouraged to be flexible with students missing class because of illness. If students are feeling classic symptoms of the novel H1N1 influenza, officials are hoping they will stay home until the fever subsides and avoid spreading the virus across campus, where a majority of the risk categories converge.
"There will be some students who take advantage of it, but we'd much rather err on keeping everybody safe and healthy," said Les Chatelain, special assistant for emergency management at the University of Utah. He said they've asked faculty to work with students complaining of sickness, including a tweaking of syllabi to allow for excused absences, makeup test dates and virtual classroom correspondence when necessary.
Faculty members in the College of Arts and Humanities at Weber State University were recently reminded to take roll very carefully in the first few days of school, verifying e-mail addresses for all students in the class.
"There is a chance that H1N1 could hit us hard; given the seriousness of the infection, classes may have to be canceled and alternatives found," Dean Madonne Miner said in a departmentwide staff e-mail. "It is imperative that faculty and staff are able to contact students."
Brigham Young University sent e-mails to students and faculty last week, advising them to practice good hygiene, to keep their hands clean and use alcohol-based hand sanitizers often. Bottles of the stuff are showing up in classrooms at campuses across the state.
The infamous swine flu has kept many health departments in the U.S. and worldwide on alert since its outbreak earlier this year, earning official global pandemic status. It has infected some 8,000 people. The deaths of more than 500 people have been attributed to the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified major risk categories, and college students fit into quite a few of them, specifically at locations where students are being trained for occupations in health care.
"It's definitely a challenge," Chatelain said. He said with only 160 million doses of the vaccine available in the country, it is unlikely that the school will receive enough vaccinations to make a difference in late fall. The U. houses eight day-care centers in which students work with young children, who also fit into the CDC's high-risk group of people from birth to age 25.
"College-aged students are particularly vulnerable to this virus, and they are not necessarily seeing a doctor on a regular basis," U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "A lot of them have not had regular vaccine updates. They need to be encouraged to not only take care of themselves, isolating themselves when they are sick, but also to take advantage of the vaccine when it becomes available."
Peterson is among the many skeptical college students who believe they are invincible to the rampant illness, but he realizes that one sick person can change that for everyone.
"I just hope people can take care of themselves, and then we don't have to worry about it so much," he said.
e-mail: wleonard@desnews.com