Ok so when you talk about a pandemic… folks call you an alarmist if the pandemic doesn’t hit. But if it does hit… and you didn’t talk strongly about it, those same moron’s will be calling you unprepared.

I hate that there has to be fear to motivate some folks. And then I get frustrated by the folks who can’t even let fear motivate them. Gah.

You can bet that many of the folks who COULD leave New Orleans and didn’t… didn’t because they thought “it wont happen here”. The path of least resistance was to do nothing. And those people were hopping mad when the government failed to save them. And trust me… Katrina is like a cakewalk compared to what a pandemic could do to our supply chains. Even if the pandemic doesn’t hit N. America… we’ll close our borders to protect ourselves. Imports will stop for quite awhile. Did you know that 95% of latex gloves are made in china? How’d ya like to have a shortage of those in hospitals even if there is no flu here? What about all the medicines that are manufactured overseas? Our global-just-in-time economy will suffer. We’ll all suffer. We’ll survive, but it might not be pleasant for awhile right?

Me… I’m going with alarmist. I believe in being prepared. I view it’s my parental duty to keep my children safe. I prepare for many things that might not ever happen. I make my kids wear a life jacket even though I don’t think they will drown. I buy car insurance even though I dont think I’ll be in a car accident. I make my kids wear a seat belt, even though I dont think they will go through the windshield. I keep motrin around the house for when they have a headache, so they dont have to deal with the discomfort. So the whole arguement that “I dont think it’s likely…. so I won’t do anything” doesn’t fly for me.

So this post isn’t about trying to convince anyone… it’s more about simply ranting about the folks who are aware and still choose to do nothing. Drives me bonkers.

Anyway… here’s the lastest article. Please educate yourself and be prepared.

New UN pandemic czar says survival of “world as we know it” may be at stake

ontario news
Sunday, Oct 02, 2005
TORONTO (CP) - A flu pandemic could fundamentally alter the world as we know it, warns the public health veteran charged with co-ordinating UN planning for and response to the threat.
Inadequate - and inequitably shared - global resources and the uncertainties inherent in trying to predict the behaviour of influenza combine to create planning dilemmas that are “monster difficult,” Dr. David Nabarro said in an interview describing his new job and the challenges ahead.

Progress will demand appealing “to people’s recognition that we’re dealing here with world survival issues - or the survival of the world as we know it,” Nabarro explains.

“And therefore we just can’t go on approaching it with sort of business-as-usual type approaches.”

The former head of the World Health Organization’s crisis operations was seconded to the UN to co-ordinate world response to both the ongoing avian influenza outbreak in Southeast Asia and preparations for a human flu pandemic.

A native of Britain, Nabarro says the decision to appoint a planning czar reflects surging political concern that the world may be facing a pandemic springing from the H5N1 avian flu strain, which is decimating poultry in Asia and has already killed at least 60 people in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

“Governments have realized that this is something to be worried about,” he says, adding the UN must harness that concern and the resources it frees up.

“It’s a rare thing, political commitment to deal with a health issue. And when you’ve got it, you must use it well,” he insists.

“We’re not going to have such an excellent window of opportunity to really start moving forward with this for long. And so we must take advantage of it now.”

One of the monster dilemmas Nabarro describes relates to antiviral drugs, which may be able to blunt the blow of pandemic flu.

But there are only two drugs which, in laboratory settings, work against all possible pandemic strains, oseltamivir (sold as Tamiflu) and zanamivir (sold as Relenza). Both are expensive and made in limited quantities. And there appears to be no quick or easy way to ramp up production.

In addition, the supplies that exist - as well as most of those that will be made in the foreseeable future - are spoken for. They are either squirreled away in or destined for stockpiles held by the world’s wealthy nations.

“So we’re going to have very little stuff and it’s already stuck away in stockpiles . . . that people will protect with their lives. And yet we’re going to have to find some way to ration these things so that they are given to the folk who need them the most,” Nabarro says.

That statement may reflect Nabarro’s position on the pandemic learning curve. Setting priorities for who will and won’t get antiviral drugs is a responsibility of governments, not the UN or the WHO.

Nabarro also made several missteps in his initial news conference at the UN on Thursday, including straying far afield from the WHO’s estimate of the number of deaths a new pandemic might exact. He suggested between five million and 150 million people might die.

Less than 24 hours later the Geneva-based WHO reeled back in Nabarro’s estimate, saying its own longstanding projection of two million to 7.4 million excess deaths was more likely. The official WHO estimate was calculated using a mathematical model based largely on the Hong Kong flu of 1968, the mildest pandemic of the last century.

If Nabarro is still learning the myriad intricacies of his new subject, he appears to already understand that the eventual death toll is only a portion of the damage a pandemic would wreak.

“It would really disturb many, many systems and our capacity to cope in many countries would not be that great,” he says, predicting food supplies in the developed world - where diets are comprised almost exclusively of purchased (not home-grown) food - “would be particularly badly hit.”

A leading advocate for pandemic preparedness, Dr. Michael Osterholm, has warned a pandemic would have a substantial and highly disruptive impact on the production and movement of goods, leading to shortages of many products critical to daily life.

He says at this point, planning for ways to keep society functioning must be the priority task.

“We basically are going to have a lot of the world’s population who are going to come through this,” says Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“But just as we saw, very painfully in the Gulf States (after Hurricane Katrina), a lot of people are going to suffer a great deal who are going to live.

“And we need to plan about how we’re going to minimize that suffering and get those people through so they don’t die from other collateral damage-related concerns. Like lack of other medications. Lack of food. Water.”

Nabarro acknowledges the challenges ahead are enormous.

“My base point is: How to deal with an issue that’s so impossibly difficult that we’re bound to end up saying ‘We didn’t get it right’ if there is a pandemic, or, if there isn’t a pandemic where people are going to say ‘You scared us all for nothing.’ ”

© The Canadian Press, 2005

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