The Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog is a five-week long blog campaign to help Americans prepare for a coming pandemic. Each week, a question will be posted and guest bloggers will write about the relevant issue at hand. Comments are open and welcome from everyone.
Pierre Omidyar, Founder and Chairman of Ebay, posts about “Why care, why prepare?” from his perspective as individual member of society. His points -
1. No matter what gets done at a global level, hospitals and health care may not be there for us when we need it in a pandemic.
2. Families and neighborhoods will be on their …read more

Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, USA -

“Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal or state government will rescue them will be tragically mistaken.”

[source: Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog]
Tags: pandemic, flu, avian, bird flu, preparedness

In line with a leadership forum on pandemic preparedness this June 13 in Washington, DC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched a new blog -
The Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog.
From the blog:

This five-week online event, beginning on May 22, is part of an ongoing effort by the Department to help Americans become more prepared for a pandemic. The blog summit provides an opportunity to have an open conversation and shape the thinking about how to communicate the critical need for preparedness at home and within workplaces and communities.
The blog summit is intended to be a dynamic online conversation; …read more

A war game, if you may. That’s how networks called the 48-hour drill that the US Center of Disease Control conducted this week to test the responses of US government agencies.
In a classic outbreak scenario, the script called for a student infected with a new strain of H5N1 returns from Indonesia and dies, but not before infecting others, including members of a swimming team.
By end of day One, 12 people contracted the disease in four states, and 25 percent die.
By Day Two, the cases double to 25 and the CDC is forced to consider severe control measures – closing schools, …read more

I guess the US government would rather have an excess than a shortage any year, so the 2007-2008 flu season will have anywhere from 127 to 132 million doses of vaccines available, maybe even more.
Despite throwing away 10 million unused vaccines from last season, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention approved the production of this much vaccine supply for the coming flu season.
Earlier this year, there were 18 million doses of vaccines unsold, due in part of delay in distribution and a mild flu season. There was worry that scenario will cause vaccine manufacturers to procude less for the …read more

Until doctors can find another drug that can treat his tuberculosis, Robert Daniels is spending the rest of his life in jail-like isolation.
Daniels has what the World Health O. dubbed as XDR-TB, or extremely drug resistant tuberculosis , which is virtually untreatable using current anti-TB drugs. Daniels was considered “uncooperative and a danger to the public” and was ordered locked up because he did not take precautions to avoid infecting others or even to wear a mask in public. Although currently rare in the US, XDR-TB broke out in Africa last year with an alarmingly high mortality rate. XDR-TB is …read more

Tamiflu (oseltamivir) is probably the most widely used drug to treat influenza, but several months ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to watch for signs of bizarre behavior in children taking the flu drug.
Today, Japan took that warning one step further and ordered doctors not to give Tamiflu to teenagers, after a total of 15 teens taking the drug either killed or injured themselves since 2004. In the past two months alone, two 12-year old boys taking Tamiflu jumped out of their houses in separate incidents. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has also reported that …read more

When dozens of police officers call in sick on a busy weekend, there’s bound to be suspicion.
Seventeen police officers from the same district in Buffalo, New York called in sick in a two-day stretch. In four other districts, 26 officers called in sick during the same period. A spokesman for the Police Benevolent Association said the officers called in sick they were sick.
So is there a flu epidemic running amok in the Buffalo area?
The mayor’s office didn’t think so. Looking more like the ‘blue flu’, Mayor Byron Brown warned police officers of falsely calling out sick for work while rumors …read more

More than 10 million unsold doses of flu vaccines will be considered trash on June 30th. The vaccines are expired so that only an all-new recipe will be in market come the next flu season. But this annual practice has been getting some heat because these vaccines are perfectly good and may still be useful.
The federal Food and Drug Administration set an annual expiration date for destroying unused vaccines so the recipe for each new flu season only includes the three strains causing the most cases. No one has tested if the vaccines are potent beyond the June 30 date, …read more

Will a vaccine’s 45% effectiveness be sufficient to protect the US population against a pandemic?
That’s the question that the Food and Drug Administration staff are asking themselves about Sanofi Aventis’ new bird flu vaccine. The FDA will meet on Tuesday to weigh approval of a bird flu vaccine that is less effective than previously published. In a follow up clinical trial, Sanofi’s two-shot vaccine stimulated an immune response in only 45 percent of study participants. Last March, published results showed that the vaccine protected 54 percent of patients, when tested a month after getting the second shot.
In …read more