There's a frightening implication in the success of Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health's H1N1 immunization program.

The local health unit did an exemplary job of getting thousands of doses of vaccine out to doctors and the public through a host of special community clinics.

Sure, there were some glitches. Clinic planners certainly didn't seem to anticipate the huge and immediate demand for the H1N1 shot when clinics were announced - everyone wanted the vaccine right away.

But consider this. The local health unit has co-ordinated the distribution of more than 80,000 doses of vaccine, actually giving more than 30,000 of those doses with their own clinics. It's taken a little over a month - demand has dropped off lately - and taxed health unit resources to the limit: other Public Health programs have essentially shut down.

And that was to immunize only 30 percent of the population.

How could we possibly have handled something more serious, a more deadly disease, or something that needed the fast immunization of a much larger percentage of the population?

What about something that put 50 percent of those who caught it in the hospital? Or with a high mortality rate? Or something so highly contagious that everyone would need immunizing to avoid getting it?

There's no doubt Public Health and all those involved in the H1N1 vaccine program did a stellar job of dealing with the crisis, but there's a danger in merely congratulating them on a job well done.

Doing that would ignore the lesson of the whole H1N1 episode, that our health resources are woefully inadequate to deal with a really serious disease.

Given what was needed to immunize 30 percent of the population over the course of a month, what would it take to vaccinate 100 percent of the population in a week?

It would mean hiring and training hundreds of people to administer the shots, finding a place large enough to process thousands of people quickly, staffing it with non-medical guides and helpers, setting up tables and chairs for people getting the shots, finding computers to register them ...

We would have to set up a system where, for example, everyone in Centre Wellington Ward 1 went to the Elora Community Centre on Day 1 at staggered times, to get the shot.

About 300 people showed up at the Fergus clinic to get the H1N1 shot on its first day - and they had to stand in line for hours outside. A true mass immunization - especially of a highly contagious disease that might already be in the population - couldn't have thousands of people standing in line outside.

It's clear that such an immunization program would need vast financial resources and a huge amount of pre-event logistics planning, if we're going to avoid an escalation of the glitches and frustration that accompanied the first days of the H1N1 program.

We were lucky that H1N1 gave us months of lead time to get a vaccine, that it's no more contagious than regular flu, that despite all the negative hype, it wasn't on the whole more deadly than regular flu.

If the next pandemic is more serious, more prevalent, more deadly, and if the plans and resources aren't available quickly, we may find coping with it much more difficult.