California school districts will receive 23 million Masks and Gloves 12/06/09 7:19am

California school districts will receive 23 million Masks and Gloves

Is this a ploy for hysteria to get people to take the Swine Flu Vaccine in California?
How is it California can get this amount of money on masks and gloves in a federal grant, yet the Federal Government won't give them money for anything else? So the money goes to Big Pharma for masks and gloves (which are pharma owned companies)? This information "stinks" of propaganda and another way of getting people to get the Swine Flu Vaccine in mass! Of course those are just my opinions.
Funny how California is in need of more important things for it's population than masks and gloves.

Article:

California school districts will receive 23 million masks and pairs of gloves to help curb the spread of swine flu, the state schools chief announced Friday.

"We want to keep students, teachers and staff healthy and in school," Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell O'Connell said in a statement.

Details of the program were being released at a Los Angeles County warehouse in Santa Fe Springs packed with boxes of disposable gloves and masks.

The items, paid for by federal grants, will be shipped free to 58 county offices of education and to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the nation's second-largest district.

They are intended for roughly 10,000 public schools with about 6.3 million students in more than 1,000 districts, said Hilary McLean, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. Shipping of the supplies began late last month, she said.

Federal guidelines recommend that students with H1N1 symptoms such as fever, cough, and sore throat be sent to a separate office or sick room until they can leave campus.

But it can take several hours before parents can pick up their children, McLean said.

In the meantime, the child will be asked to wear a surgical mask while the school nurse or other staffer will wear a different type of mask and gloves, McLean said.

There have been more than 7,200 cases of swine flu reported in California this year, 366 of them fatal, according to the state Department of Public Health.

Although some counties have reported drops in the number of new swine flu cases, indicating the pandemic may have peaked locally, McLean said schools can always store the masks and gloves in case there's an outbreak of another type of flu.

"Next year, we're sure to have another flu season," she said.