At long last, the much anticipated swine/Mexico/H1N1 flu has arrived in Connecticut, state officials say. A Stratford man who had traveled to Cancun in mid-April is the state’s first confirmed case of the virus.
The man, who is between 30 and 40 years old, has made a full recovery.
State officials are still awaiting word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as to whether a Fairfield adult and two Fairfield University students who live on-campus have the H1N1 flu.
Four Yale affiliates are being treated for mild cases of the flu, and samples have been sent to the Connecticut Department of Public Health to determine whether any of the cases are indeed swine flu, the University announced Thursday.
“These patients all live off campus, and they are only mildly ill and receiving treatment at home,” Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer wrote in an e-mail message to the Yale community this afternoon. “As a precautionary measure, these patients are receiving anti-viral medications. If it turns out that any members of the Yale community have confirmed cases of swine flu, we will let you know right away.”
In other news, Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced that two students at Fairfield University have been identified by state health offiicals as “probable” for swine flu, raising the number of probable cases in Connecticut to five. Rell added that neither of the students had reported traveling recently.
Samples from the two Fairfield students have been sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing, the governor said. In addition, two other suspected cases in East Haddam, Conn., turned out to not be swine flu, she said.
Yalies who prefer the underground to their college libraries will once again have the opportunity to hole up in Bass Library for a solid 65 hours as exams approach, as the Yale University Library announced today that Bass will remain open from 10 a.m. on Saturday to 3 a.m. Tuesday.
Associate University Librarian Danuta Nitecki said that the 24-hour schedule is once again “an experiment” and that the library will revisit the issue again next year to determine whether to make it an annual event. The Bass Library first offered 24-hour access during exams last spring but Nitecki said that reports of students bringing food, tents and even alcohol into the library caused concern among administrators.
Beyond student behavior, however, Nitecki said that finding custodial staff and security to work through the night can prove difficult, and in a time of tightening budgets, securing funding to pay staff for overtime was a challenge leading up to this year’s exam period.
Swine flu sure sounds scary. But Yale has spent the better part of the last two years preparing for an even scarier kind of flu — bird flu.
Since the bird flu scare that swept the world in 2006, Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer has led a team charged with making preparations in case a pandemic bird flu ever reaches Yale’s campus. Yale has even made plans to have hundreds of hospital beds set up, if necessary, in the William K. Lanman Center in Payne Whitney Gymnasium.
Nobody, so far, thinks that those measures will need to be taken as a result of the swine flu.
Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer sent an e-mail message to the Yale community this afternoon offering an update on Yale’s preparations for a possible outbreak of the swine flu. Lorimer urged Elis to seek medical attention if they exhibit any flu-like symptoms. She also asked employees to resist the urge to come to work if they are feeling under the weather.
“Often devoted staff and faculty persevere and come to work when they are ill,” she wrote. “This is NOT the time to do this. Use your sick time! Obviously this is a very busy time of the year, but we need to consider the health of others at this time.”
For more on Yale’s preparations for a flu outbreak, see Florence Dethy’s report in today’s News.
Lorimer’s message also included a set of frequently asked questions — prepared by Yale University Health Services Medical Director Michael Rigsby MED ’88 — about the swine flu virus. Read them after the jump. The takeaway: Don’t touch infected pigs, and if you do, you probably should go to YUHS.
At a ceremony Thursday night in Saybrook College, Yale College Dean Mary Miller stands in front of her own portrait, which features herself at a piano with her cat, Rainbow. “I realize that the three of them together [Miller, her husband, Saybrook Master Edward Kamens, and Rainbow] have been the masters of this college,” said Saybrook Dean Paul McKinley.
If students in the class of 2013 are lucky, they may get to see the Payne Whitney Gymnasium without scaffolding before they graduate. But probably not.
Like almost all campus construction, the facade work on the gym has been put on hold because of the economic downturn. That means the scaffolding is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Two weeks ago, we noted that an administrator we had never heard of (David Gingerella, the senior director of business operations for science and technology) was seeking the presidency of a school we had never heard of (Florida International University in Miami).
This got us excited. Yale, after all, has quite the track record with grooming future college presidents. There’s Alison Richard at Cambridge, Jared Cohon at Carnegie Mellon, Susan Hockfield at MIT, Dick Brodhead at Duke, Rebecca Chopp at Colgate, Kim Bottomly at Wellesley and, as of next fall, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford.
Alas, Gingerella will not be joining that list. (Or at least not yet.)
Gingerella (whose biography is available here) was not one of 13 candidates whom FIU’s search committee decided to interview for the position. Yesterday, the search committee said it had whittled its list down to three candidates — two FIU insiders and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Locals 34 and 35, Yale’s two labor unions that together represent over 4,500 employees across the University, voted to approve an early contract agreement Tuesday night, marking what University President Richard Levin said he hopes will be a “new chapter” in Yale’s relations with labor unions.
“This is truly a historic day for Yale University, for the community in which we all live and work,” Levin said. “An extraordinary achievement.”
The new three-year contracts will improve health benefits, increase job security and allow both unions to increase in number. In return, the unions have agreed to alter their wage system over the next three years to save money for the University.
As just another sign that we’re not the only ones interested in Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh’s quest to win confirmation as legal adviser to the State Department, The New York Times’s Opinionator blog posted an entry entitled “The Fight over the Harold Koh Nomination: A Field Guide” this afternoon.
For readers looking to get up-to-speed on the Koh saga, the field guide is indeed a comprehensive overview of the back-and-forth surrounding Koh’s nomination. It even includes the unexpected endorsement that Koh received from former Solicitor General Kenneth Star last week, as our Derek Tam revealed on Monday.
