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.
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

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

April 7 is marked as WORLD HEALTH DAY and this year’s focus is all about “international health security“.
Globalization has brought with it increasing health and security threats, and yet also more opportunities to disseminate information, and rapidly respond to outbreaks that most certainly will affect more than one nation. To quote the issues paper -

(There is a) need to reduce the vulnerability of people around the world to new, acute or rapidly spreading risks to health, particularly those that threaten to cross international borders…
The danger that new diseases to which there is universal vulnerability will cause international harm means that …read more

”The (Indonesian) government’s campaign against bird flu does not reach the people at the grassroots level,” complains a parent from West Java.
Because of this common sentiment, a group of Indonesian moms decided to take matters in their own hands by organizing a talk show on the bird flu. Some of the topcs addressed were basic information about the nature of H5N1, how families should treat sick of dying poultry and what to do if they do get flu-like symptoms. The audience was a mixture of association members, school drivers, students and teachers. After showing a flm titled ‘Race against the …read more