Health departments soon will offer the H1N1 vaccine to all residents, possibly in the next two weeks, reversing a national trend of giving it only to those deemed high risk of contracting the virus.
"We really want to vaccinate as many people as possible," Eden Wells, a medical epidemiologist with the Michigan Department of Community Health, said Monday.
The national delay in the vaccine's production has led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that available shots only be offered to five priority groups: pregnant women; children ages 6 months to 24 years; caregivers of infants younger than 6 months; emergency and health care workers and people ages 25 to 64 with underlying health conditions.
Some health departments in Michigan and nationwide have faced such shortages that they've only offered it to subsets of the priority group. Beginning Tuesday, the state's 45 health department will no longer do so.
Before the arrival of the vaccine, the CDC said Michigan would have 1.5 million doses by mid-October. Those supplies were slow in coming, but the CDC has now cleared the state to get 2.2 million doses. Of those, about 1.8 million have arrived.
For now, the vaccine is only available to priority groups, which is about half of the state's 10 million residents.
Soon it will be available to all residents, but not until local health officials can "assure (the state) that these high-risk groups have had an adequate chance to be vaccinated," Wells said
Five more deaths have been liked to swine flu since last week in Michigan as the death toll increase to 59 people since April.
Meanwhile flu-like illnesses reported to the state from Nov. 15-21 was 25,074.
Overall, the addition of the swine flu strain has spiked the number of cases this year unlike years past.
Nearly 625,000 Michigan residents have reported flu-like illnesses since mid-November -- a 30 percent increase over all reported cases in 2008.
In 2008, the state recorded 416,972 cases of flu-like illnesses and 404,476 cases in 2007.
Since Nov. 14, the state has recorded 624,630 cases and there are still six weeks left to add to the 2009 tally.
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