The Student Health Center received its first shipment of H1N1 vaccines Thursday  night after several weeks of uncertain waiting.Julie Hupperich, associate director of the Health Center, said the shipment of 3,000 vaccines is being stored for student and faculty distribution starting Monday, Nov. 30, after the Thanksgiving holiday.Distribution of the injectable inoculations will be available to students and faculty free of charge, Hupperich said.Students and faculty who look to receive inoculations can visit the Wellness Education Department, Suite 2 on the ground floor of the Health Center between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. next week.The distribution method will be modeled after previous weeks of vaccination in October when students could show up at the Health Center and simply request a vaccination without an appointment, Hupperich said. “We’ll just handle it like we do seasonal flu week,” she said. “Hopefully, that will work out fine.”The vials containing the vaccinations arrived in 300 small boxes. Each of the vials contains 10 individual doses and are kept in a refrigerator to keep them from expiring. Hupperich said distribution will follow the priority group guidelines dictated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The largest of those groups, people from 6 months to 24 years old will have priority to the vaccines. Other at-risk groups include health care professionals, caretakers of children under 6 months old and people with chronic illnesses, according to the CDC.Hupperich said the University still sees students arrive at the Health Center with typical flu symptoms. The number has decreased substantially from the levels of the initial outbreak, she said there have been 1,251 confirmed on-campus cases of Type A non-seasonal influenza as of Nov. 13.But she said those numbers are misleading because many of the Health Center caregivers stopped performing nasal swabs to confirm the presence of the virus. The Health Center stopped testing students for the virus in September when the outbreak level peaked on campus. Treating the virus doesn’t require laboratory confirmation.The process of receiving the vaccinations took longer than expected, but Hupperich said she was glad the Health Center received the full requested amount.Hupperich said there was a possibility the inoculations could have arrived in separate allotments over the course of several weeks.Dr. Frank Welch, medical director for pandemic preparedness in Louisiana, said the vaccines arrived late because of slow production. He said the vaccines are “basically cooked like soup” in industrial-sized vats before being shipped to distributors.Hupperich said the Health Center requested 3,000 doses of the vaccines based on the number of students and faculty who requested seasonal flu vaccines when they were made available in October.She said the Health Center also surveyed University faculty and staff to judge how many fit into priority groups and how many planned to receive inoculations.”Only time will tell how accurate we were with those numbers,” Hupperich said.Welch said Louisiana is expected to receive about 2.3 million doses in various forms — including both intranasal sprays and injectable inoculations — by the end of January.- – – -Contact Adam Duvernay at [email protected]