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YSU reacts to mock anthrax attack
Nursing faculty, students conduct exercise
YOUNGSTOWN
Nursing faculty and students and health-clinic staff members at Youngstown State University and representatives of the Mahoning County Health Department responded to an anthrax attack on campus.
Don’t be alarmed, however. It was just a training exercise.
During the Friday exercise, the antibiotics Ciprofloxacin and Doxycycline, represented by candy, were given to members of the university community, who would start taking the medications within 48 hours after their exposure to anthrax to avoid getting sick.
“If there ever was a disaster, we would be much more prepared for it just from having this
exercise,” said Maria Melfe of Austintown, a nursing student.
“We’ll have a lot more confidence if anything did ever happen” because of the information provided by the exercise, she said.
In the mock disaster, the university was a “closed unit,” providing the antibiotics to university-affiliated people instead of having them wait in line at county-run open points of dispensing, or PODs.
“The more closed PODs that we can do and help facilitate with different organizations, the less people are going to be standing in general-population lines,” Joe Diorio, director of community health at the county health department, told the students.
The scenario was a small explosion that had occurred Thursday at the university’s student center, with emergency responders and the FBI having found a white substance believed to be anthrax at the scene.
Local public-health officials determined an immediate need to dispense the antibiotics from the strategic national stockpile to those who were in the student center when the blast occurred.
The student health center was inundated with frantic phone calls. People with symptoms of illness were instructed to go to a hospital emergency room, not the university medication dispensing point.
Two nurses and the physician from the university health clinic, four nursing faculty members, and 93 junior-level nursing students participated in the public-health-emergency training exercise in the university’s Cushwa Hall.
YSU police, who would provide security in the event of a medication distribution during a real disaster, were present.
With participants wearing brightly colored vests designating their roles, the drill was designed to be “a learning experience for the students” and an exercise “in the planning of future disaster preparation for YSU,” said Molly Roche, clinical nursing instructor.
Vests were green for public health nurses, yellow for medical reserve corps volunteers and red for incident commanders.
“The first part of their nursing process is looking and listening so they can make good decisions” in assessing patients and their problems and needs, said Nancy Wagner, nursing department chairwoman. “They’re also learning about public-health issues,” she added.
The medication-distribution drill was conducted in the new John and Dorothy Masternick Nursing Simulation Laboratory on the third floor of Cushwa Hall, which will be dedicated Monday during an 11 a.m. ceremony.
The lab contains Windsor, the Sim Man, a computerized patient manikin used to provide a lifelike patient-care experience, with respiration, heart rhythms, blood pressure and stomach sounds.
The Masternick family, which donated the money for the lab, owns and operates Windsor House Inc., which has 11 nursing homes and four assisted-living communities in Northeast Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania.