ORONO, Maine — As students at Maine’s colleges, universities and other residential schools arrive on campus for the start of the 2009-10 academic year, they will encounter a new twist to their orientation programs.

School officials have been working overtime to prepare for an expected surge in cases of the H1N1 flu and getting the word out to students and their families — as well as faculty and staff — is paramount.

Already, colleges across the country are seeing spikes in the number of students with suspected cases of swine flu as dorms fill up and classes begin for the fall semester.

At Georgia Tech in Atlanta, for example, 150 suspected cases of the highly contagious virus have been identified in the two weeks since students moved back to campus.

Wayne Maines, director of safety and environmental management at the University of Maine in Orono, said Thursday that campus planning for the H1N1 outbreak began last spring when the first cases in Mexico and Southern California began to make national news. Fortunately, the university graduated the class of 2009 and most students left campus before the viral disease had a chance to spread into New England.

Now, though, public health officials expect to see cases multiply quickly as students re-enter the close confines of dormitories, classrooms, cafeterias and other shared spaces. Children and college-age adults are among the groups most prone to serious illness from H1N1.

Maines said students will be met with e-mail messages, links to a campus H1N1 Web site, posters and H1N1 presentations from school officials and their resident assistants. Everyone on campus will be actively encouraged to practice good respiratory hygiene — to cover coughs and sneezes, wash hands frequently and stay home or in the dorm when they are ill. The university is developing policies to encourage workers to stay home even without paid sick time, Maines said, and sick students will have access to computer-based options for continuing their studies without leaving their dorm rooms.

“The goal is to reduce potential exposures on campus,” he said.

In addition, he said, all UM students will be urged to get a vaccine for the regular seasonal flu to help keep them healthy and less likely to develop severe symptoms if they do contract H1N1.

Limited supplies of a new vaccine for H1N1 are expected to become available later this year and will be available to students through the on-campus health center, Maines said.

Rosa Redonnett of the University of Maine System office said all seven state universities have adopted similar strategies, based on national recommendations released earlier this month from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s very consistent from campus to campus within the system,” she said. University campuses will not close unless the number or severity of cases makes normal operations impossible, she said.

At private Husson University in Bangor, student health center director Connie Potvin said students who become ill with flu symptoms will be encouraged to go home if they live within 250 miles of the campus. Those who remain will be asked to recover in their dorm rooms, even if they have a roommate.

“Most of our rooms are doubles with enough space for one student who is healthy and one who is ill,” Potvin said. Maintaining a distance of four to six feet between students will limit the spread of the illness, she said.

Should the number of affected students become overwhelming, she said, a separate area for isolating sick students from healthy ones will be set aside.

“It’s hard to know what course this will take,” she said of the H1N1 outbreak. “But we feel prepared.”

Dr. Dora Anne Mills, head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday that national guidelines for colleges and universities were developed with input from states’ experience with H1N1 this past spring and summer.

Maine’s experience coping with the virus in more than 40 of the state’s residential summer camps for children, as well as lessons from the 1918 flu pandemic here, helped inform the national guidelines, she said. She said the Maine CDC will continue to work closely with federal officials and all residential schools in the state to ensure they have accurate and up-to-date information for responding to the outbreak.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

mhaskell@bangordailynews.net

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