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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (36598)	1/30/2004 12:33:33 AM
From: abuelita	Respond to of 89467

i don't like the sound of that. from an article in today's vancouver sun: ".....A similar study in the Netherlands, published last spring in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, estimated a fivefold increase in the number of hospitalizations and deaths over the six-week period of a pandemic. Eighteen months ago, public health authorities in a rural area of Ontario gathered to play the equivalent of a war game using just such a scenario for the Leeds, Grenville and Lanark district. It's an area in which the population is scattered across a number of small communities, the largest of which is Brockville with 21,000 people. The exercise and what was learned from it were published in this month's edition of the Canadian Journal of Public Health and, while many aspects of the planning were reassuring, others were worrisome. The scenario began with a death in China attributed to a new influenza virus, reports from the World Health Organization of high rates of an influenza-like illness among children and adults, then an outbreak among delegates to an international conference meeting at a big Ontario city. Participants, who represented medical, police, fire and civic authorities from the health district's pandemic planning committee suddenly had to cope with 27,000 casualties of whom 500 required immediate hospitalization and 200 were dying. As care providers became ill, managers also had to deal with a 40-per- cent absentee rate at hospitals, long-term care facilities, community health centres and among first-response teams. Lab test slowed to a crawl as technicians were overwhelmed with samples. Bed shortages and insufficient ventilators meant deaths began to rise from secondary infections. Doctors became too busy to sign death certificates, but morticians refused to move corpses without them. Normally mundane problems became critical ones. As schools and day cares closed, essential service providers suddenly found themselves faced with unexpected child care difficulties while being required to work overtime in the middle of a raging epidemic. Drug supplies were inadequate and, with only 10,000 doses of vaccine available, those doses were reserved for essential service workers. A black market in anti-viral drugs quickly emerged. Tensions escalated. Medical authorities were threatened when vaccine wasn't available. Worried parents bombarded officials with demands for information. Disagreements erupted among the authorities themselves over the definition of essential services. Should they include mortuary workers, for example? Among the positive outcomes, the regional pandemic planning committee was able to make substantial changes to its existing plan, including provisions for emergency internment, disease containment, supply management, support systems for essential service providers and a coordinated method for dealing with mass fatalities. At the top of the list, the demand for a clear, coordinated communication strategy for informing the public swiftly, honestly and accurately about the real situation, what to do in response and what was being done by officials. Yet the authors point out that despite epidemiologists' warnings that we are long overdue for another lethal pandemic, only one other planning exercise for coping appears to have taken place in Canada, that one in Trois-Rivieres. As events unfold in Asia, that is not reassuring. A plan is one thing typed neatly on a sheet of paper and circulated among bureaucrats, it's another thing entirely when people are trying to implement it in a crisis." complete article here: canada.com