Swine Phew! Colleges Work To Keep You Healthy This Fall

By Marisa

If you thought we were out of the woods with swine flu when summer began, you’re sadly mistaken. Health officials predict that come the fall, the H1N1 virus will begin to spread once again. Residential colleges are expected to be hit particularly hard, as dorms make the perfect breeding grounds for the spread of illness. (Lots of people with not-so-clean living habits? Hellooooo, disease!) But don’t start freaking out and sterilizing your possessions just yet; colleges are aware of the situation and are taking steps to help keep their students healthy.

To put it crudely: everyone chill the f*ck out. They got this.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control decided to include 19 to 24 year-olds in the first-priority group for the swine flu vaccine, due out in October. This age group has seen many of the worst cases of swine flu, and the college experience of living, studying, and socializing together makes students even more susceptible to the virus. If you thought your roommate was impossible to live with before, wait until he or she gets sick. You’d have to have an immune system of steel not to catch whatever she’s got.

The vaccine, however, is not a fail-safe way of combating the spread of swine flu. When students do get sick, they will have to be isolated from other students for a week. This poses a problem for schools that simply don’t have enough room to accommodate sick students. Harvard University plans to expand its infirmary’s capacity to 35 beds, but that may not be enough if swine flu spreads throughout the school.

A worst-case scenario would involve canceling classes (yay!) and closing down campus dining halls (yay or nay, depending on your school). Should that occur, Skidmore College is prepared to distribute Meals, Ready to Eat (relatively speakng, of course) to sick students. We can only hope that ready-to-eat meatloaf will not become a reality, but at least you won’t go hungry should the dining hall close down!

Ideally, school officials would like for family or friends to pick up ill students. If worse really came to worst, students with swine flu would go home to recover, which, unfortunately, wouldn’t mean a homework-free vacay.  Skidmore and other colleges plan to provide online learning tools to help students keep up with their work if they are forced to leave campus. Sucks for them, but with video lectures and online notes, this could be heavenly for those students who steer clear of the Swine.

School and health officials don’t want you to panic about swine flu. Truthfully, there is nothing to panic over, anyway. This isn’t going to be the 1918 flu pandemic all over again. We won’t see mass deaths as a result of this outbreak. Unless you count the battle royale that will ensue for the last mealoaf MRE…