Death toll in Samoas tsunami reaches 150

Samoa – Stunned Samoans combed through the sodden wreckage of their lives and told of the terror of being trapped underwater or flung inland by a tsunami that ravaged towns and killed at least 150 people in the South Pacific. Officials expect the death toll from Tuesday's disaster to rise as more areas are searched.

"The devastation caused was complete," Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele told New Zealand's National Radio on Wednesday after inspecting the southeast coast of the main island of Upolu, the most heavily hit area. "In some villages absolutely no house was standing. All that was achieved within 10 minutes by the very powerful tsunami."

His own village of Lesa was washed away, as were many others in Samoa and nearby American Samoa and Tonga . A magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa at 6:48 a.m. local time ( 1:48 p.m. EDT ; 1748 GMT) Tuesday. The islands soon were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) high that reached up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland.

"To me it was like monster just black water coming to you. It wasn't a wave that breaks, it was a full force of water coming straight," said Luana Tavale, an American Samoa government employee. Tuilaepa said the death toll in Samoa was 110, mostly elderly and young children. At least 31 people were killed on American Samoa , Gov. Togiola Tulafono said. Officials in the island nation of Tonga said nine people had been killed.

Samoan police commander Lilo Maiava predicted the toll would rise. "It may take a week, two weeks or even three weeks" to complete the search for the many people still missing, he said.

The quake was centered about 120 miles (190 kilometers) south of the nation of Samoa, formerly part of New Zealand, which has about 220,000 people, and American Samoa, a U.S. territory of 65,000. The two lie about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii , just east of the international date line. That means the tsunami hit Tuesday morning there, while it was already Wednesday in Asia .

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said it issued an alert, but the waves came so quickly that residents only had about 10 minutes to respond. New Zealand school teacher Charlie Pearse choked back tears as she spoke to New Zealand 's TV One News from an Apia hospital bed in Samoa , recalling how she was trapped underwater and thought she was going to die.

She was in the back of a truck trying to outrun the tsunami with about 20 children when a wave tossed the truck and it landed on top of them. "We all went under the water and I think a number of the children died instantly," Pearse said.

Swine Flu Alerts

It's time to stock up on hand sanitizers and tissues; flu season is upon us. Every year in the U.S. more than 200,000 people are hospitalized and 36,000 die from flu-related complications. While it's too soon to tell how extensive this year's flu outbreak might be, there's a complicating factor this season: the H1N1 virus.

H1NI, known colloquially as "swine flu," started showing up in patients last spring. In June, the World Health Organization declared swine flu a pandemic. By late August, the agency said there were more than 210,000 cases of swine flu and at least 2,185 deaths worldwide. The WHO cautions, however, that these numbers may be grossly under-reported because hard-hit countries have quit counting individual cases.

Over the summer, a handful of large pharmaceutical companies including Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis began working on a vaccine. On Sept. 15, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Norvatis and Sanofi the green light to start producing their vaccine strains. Although vaccines won't be available to the public until mid-October, many people are currently contemplating whether or not they should get the H1N1 shot.

According to guidelines drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are five key populations that should be vaccinated against the H1N1 virus:

• Pregnant women


• People who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age


• Children and young people between the ages of 6 months and 24 years


• Health care workers and emergency medical service providers


• People between 25 and 64 years of age who have chronic medical disorders or compromised immune systems.

The above groups account for approximately 159 million Americans. The CDC urges these at-risk populations to get both the swine flu shot and the seasonal flu shot. (The regular flu shot doesn't protect against the H1N1 virus.) So what should the remaining half of the U.S. population do this flu season? The answer isn't clear, especially in light of the 1976 swine flu debacle.

In 1976, a 19-year-old Army private stationed in Fort Dix , N.J. , died from the swine flu, while another 115 soldiers stationed there tested positive for swine flu antibodies. The CDC was called in to investigate, and its scientists concluded that the soldiers had a strain similar to the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which was responsible for the deadliest human pandemic of the 20th century. Although the virus hadn't spread beyond the fort, the CDC convinced then-president Gerald Ford's advisors that a mass inoculation was required. Pharmaceutical companies rushed to develop a vaccine.