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 citizens, in preparing for a pandemic. He begins with a history lesson from World War II when America was mobilized as a nation.

Millions of men and women enlisted in the army. But more than than, millions more joined the war effort on the homefront -

Housewives took off their aprons and donned tool belts, went to work in shipyards and airplane factories, and the legend of Rosie the Riveter was born. Ordinary citizens, many too old for active service, volunteered to become block wardens and aircraft spotters. Teenagers rolled bandages or served donuts for the Red Cross, and volunteers worked in VA hospitals and USO clubs around the nation. Everyone recycled for the war effort, housewives collected grease, and people accepted the need for ration coupons and meatless Tuesdays.

During WWII, there were people called ‘dollar-a-year-men‘, business executives and community leaders who served their nations at little or no pay.

Coston iterates that we need to be having that same mindset in the present time. Some of the ways ordinary citizens can put this mindset on the larger public are the following:

1. Utilize ‘flubies’, members of of flu forums who already are well informed, passionate, and ahead of the curve on pandemic preparation.

2. Send the message out through community town hall style meetings all across the country.

3. Utilize retired medical personnel – doctors, medics, nurses, who can teach home flu care and preventative hygiene classes in our communities.

4. Mobilize community volunteers – ” along the lines of a State or Federally sanctioned Volunteer Pandemic Corps, where citizens can band together to help their communities solve local problems.”

5. And Coston’s personal commitment -

“It is my hope we can create an army of graying volunteers, thin of hair, but not of spirit, to do those jobs during a pandemic we wouldn’t wish upon our children.”

Way to go!

Tags: pandemic flu, forum, leadership blog, HHS

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Pandemic Flu Forum – we are the solution

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 -

Tags: flu, pandemic, leadership forum

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Pandemic Flu Forum – teaching the basics of preparedness

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 own during a severe pandemic.

3. We can’t expect government to tell us what to do.

4. We have to look to ourselves and each other to make it through.

5. Learn as much as we can and think about how we might react should a pandemic occur.

Tags: pandemic flu, preparedness, pandemiv flu leadership blog

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Pandemic Flu Forum – Why care, why prepare?

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 overwhelmed by influenza patients.

2. Provide health care workers sufficient emergency supplies such as respirators and personal protective equipment.

I would add all medical facilities need to be up to speed with pandemic emergency preparedness and well-stocked with pandemic flu supplies. Pediatric and family clinics especially need to be in the loop, because most individuals will bring themselves and their families to smaller, probably less equipped clinics for flu-like symptoms.

Tags: pandemic flu, preparedness, pandemic flu leadership forum

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Pandemic Flu Forum – Nurses join the debate

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 pandemic can affect anyone, at any income level, those of us who are not already weakened by food insecurity, who have access to quality health care, who can afford to stay home from work to avoid infection—have a much better chance of surviving.

Ruesga point is that if America is to effectively prepare for a pandemic, then the Administration “must bolser – rather than dismantle – the safety net for the poor”, the demographic having the least chances of survival.

He urges President Bush’s adminstration NOT to cut the domestic discretionary spending, including health care services which are aimed at helping the most vulnerable group.

Tags: pandemic, preparedness, hurricane Katrina

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Pandemic Flu Forum – Lessons from Katrina

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. Coersion by passing laws or enacting policies. It may be necessary to enforce quarantines.

3. Social marketing. Appeal to a person’s values and emotions by “selling” the desired bahaviors. “The marketing approach also offers us a strategic way to think through all the aspects of convincing someone to take action”.

Tags: pandemic flu, preparedness, pandemic flu leadership forum

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Pandemic Flu Forum – Preparing for Persuasion

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 important to me, as a community, business/labor, religious, or healthcare leader?

One of the bloggers to tackle this question was Michael Coston of the Avian Flu Diary posting about “Using our time wisely” and I’d like to highlight some of the important points that he raises and issues that we still have to face.

1. The H5N1 virus continues to mutate, spread, infect new hosts. Scientists are no less concerned today than they were a year ago and study the viral evolution closerly.

2. We have the ability to observe this virus as it evolves and moves toward a pandemic strain. Which means,

3. We have the unique opportunity to prepare well. Unlike the generations past.

4. Unless the idea of a pandemic becomes part of public consciousness, the idea of preparing is unlikely to gain traction.

5. A pandemic WILL happen. and it will be ‘very, very bad’. Pandemics, on average, occurs every 30 to 40 years. It’s been 39 years since the last one. Over the past 300 years, we have seen 10 pandemics. Nothing indicates that this will change.

5. It is impossible for the government alone to prepare a nation of 300 million people.

6. There is something that each individual CAN DO to prepare, now. It starts with getting used to certain habits and

7. Basic hygiene tops it all – frequent hand washing, avoiding crowds, covering our mouth when we cough or sneeze, staying home when we are sick or suspect we have been exposed to a virus.

8. Voluntary home quarantines will significantly slow the spread. This means, if one family member is infected, everyone in the household need to stay home.

9. Preparing to stay home – having the supplies needed for weeks of “sheltering in place”, being self-sufficient – will secure their safety and protect their community. In a pandemic, two weeks of supplies may not be enough.

10. Household need to be equiiped and informed to take their own medical needs during a pandemic.

11. Preparing today, while supplies are abundant and the supply chain is intact, is the most ethical and most essential thing you can do.

12. Once a pandemic is on our doorstep, our time to prepare will have ended.

Tags: avian flu, flu pandemic, flu, preparations, Flu preparedness leadership forum

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Pandemic Flu Forum – The Need to Prepare

“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

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Flu quote of the day

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; it is open to the public for commenting. Public comments will be moderated, but participating bloggers are able to post freely. Representatives from the Department will not blog, but will comment on blog posts.

To help facilitate the dialogue, a series of questions will be posed over the five weeks, addressing the need for all Americans to prepare for pandemic influenza, the challenges that leaders will face in communicating this need and the potential solutions for overcoming those challenges. The blog will also serve to communicate lessons learned from the Leadership Forum and to communicate what needs to be done moving forward.

I’ll cover one question per day as posted on the HHS blog.

Tags: HHS, pandemic preparedness, blog

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The Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog

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 transmission. There will be attempts to contain the spread, using quarantines and antivirals. This would be a time of uncertainty. We will have days, perhaps weeks, where we won’t know if that is successful.

If that happens, we honestly don’t know how long it will take to go from our current phase III, to phase VI, a full blown pandemic.

How long before a pandemic blows up? It probably won’t take months. With the 1918 Spanish flu, it only took 5 months for the virus to spread across the globe. These days with a “highly mobile society” don’t count on it being that long.

Read on to find out FLA_Medic’s perspective on what may happen next and how you can prepare for it.

Tags: bird flu, pandemic, virus, H5N1, human-to-human, transmission

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From outbreaks to full pandemic, a perspective