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Quarantined sailors, Marines to leave Hawaii

Three visiting Navy ships with sailors quarantined with flu-like symptoms will leave for San Diego Wednesday after 69 sailors and Marines were confirmed to have had H1N1 swine flu.

The amphibious assault ship Boxer, the dock landing ship Comstock and the cruiser Lake Champlain will be heading back to the West Coast after a seven-month deployment, the Navy said.

Thousands of sailors and Marines from the ship grouping have been on leave in the Islands since Friday.

Meanwhile, the amphibious transport dock ship New Orleans, which had been outside Pearl Harbor, will pull into port Wednesday for a visit, officials said.

All four ships in the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group have crew members quarantined with flu-like symptoms, but the Navy yesterday could not say how many are in isolation in medical wards on the ships.

Cmdr. Dora Lockwood, a spokeswoman for the Navy’s 3rd Fleet in San Diego, said the ships have stopped sending samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for H1N1 confirmation because swine flu already has been identified.

Sailors in quarantine are being treated as if they have H1N1, Lockwood said.

“We’re taking extra precautions and trying to identify the sailors and Marines that do exhibit any type of symptoms and treating them with Tamiflu, so we are treating them as if they were confirmed cases,” Lockwood said.

The anti-viral drug Tamiflu is the most effective treatment for swine flu.

All 69 confirmed cases were on the aircraft carrier-like Boxer, and the symptoms were identified before the ship grouping reached Guam earlier this month, Lockwood said.

The Boxer, Comstock and Lake Champlain were not brought into port in Guam and were resupplied offshore as a precaution. The Navy said it did not have confirmation at the time that the “influenza-like illness” was H1N1.

Lockwood said the flu was relatively mild in nature and on average lasted two to four days.

All sailors who departed the ships for leave in Hawaii were thermally screened for fever, and anyone with a temperature over 100 degrees was kept on the ship, Lockwood said.

Janice Okubo, a spokeswoman for the state Health Department, said her understanding is that the Navy “did some very rigorous training” with crew to make sure they practiced good hygiene practices while on leave.

Okubo said it is possible some sailors were in the early stages of swine flu, but left their ship because they did not yet exhibit any symptoms.

“It’s the same with travelers, people (flying) to the Mainland or other countries,” Okubo said. “They could maybe not have any symptoms but arrive in a different country and develop symptoms. But there’s no way for us to quarantine those individuals or keep them from traveling.”

Okubo said among the advice given to sailors going out on leave was to isolate themselves if symptoms developed.