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. The bloggers are a diverse group of leaders from various sectors of society.
Week 2 asks this question of the blog participants:

What are my constituents concerns? How can I play an important role in communicating the need to prepare?

Michael Coston, retired medic and founder of the Avian Flu Diary shares his thoughts on our roles, as ordinary …read more

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. The bloggers are a diverse group of leaders from various sectors of society.
Week 2 asks this question of the blog participants:

What are my constituents concerns? How can I play an important role in communicating the need to prepare?

Greg Dworkin, founding editor of the Flu Wiki, summarized important points from the first week’s discussion -

The information about …read more

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

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.
Rebecca Patton of the American Nurses Association presents several interesting and practical ways of improving the health care system before a pandemic disaster strikes.
1. Change where we birth most babies. Plans should be made to expand opportunities for out-of-hospital home of birthing-center deliveries. There is no need for healthy pregnant women to go to a hospital already …read more

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.
Albert Ruesga’s contribution “Lessons from Katrina” is a post that brought pandemic preparation in a different light. Here’s why -

… (Hurricane Katrian Disaster) didn’t affect all populations equally. The poor, the elderly, and the infirm were hardest hit, populations least able to shelter properly, or flee, or recover from the storm’s devastating effects.
Likewise, while a flu …read more

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.
Nedra Weinreich of Spare Change talks about “Preparing for Persuasion”. The toughest part of pandemic preparation is getting the community involved and “putting the pandemic into the public consciousness” enough for them to want to make changes. How do we persuade people to do the right thing?
1. Education. Provide facts and statistics about pandemic and bird flu.
2. …read more

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.
The blog was launched on May 22 and already have several intelligent debate and comments going back and forth.
Week 1 of the HHS Pandemic Flu leadership blog tackled the need to prepare.

Why should we, as Americans, be concerned about personal preparedness for pandemic influenza? Why is it important that individuals commit to prepare? Why is this particularly …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

Right now we are at alert level 3 for a pandemic – a World Health Oganization phase for “no or very limited human-to-human (H2H) transmission”.
And we’ve been at this alert since late 2005. Whew. That’s really good news.
The next alert level is “evidence of increased human-to-human transmission” which means the H5N1 has mutated to a form easily transmit between humans.
Avian Flu Diary wrote a perspective on how rapidly events and alerts could escalate if and when the H5N1 virus starts mutating.

Once large clusters are noticed, it may take some time to confirm that they are, indeed, the result of H2H …read more