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To: Henry Niman who wrote (29452)	3/27/2005 5:38:49 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Respond to of 110194

Emergency services plan for 750,000 deaths in flu pandemic By Geoffrey Lean and Severin Carrell 27 March 2005 Mortuaries and emergency services are to be put on alert and told to prepare for up to three-quarters of a million deaths from a bird flu pandemic, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Emergency planners have begun to look for sites for special mortuaries, each capable of storing 1,000 bodies, and the Home Office is to hold an exercise this summer to practise coping with mass fatalities. The instruction, to go out from the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the Cabinet Office body in charge of emergencies, explodes the Government's public position that the pandemic could be expected to kill only "around 50,000" people in Britain. It shows that its true expectation is closer to the prediction made by Professor Hugh Pennington, the president of the Society for General Microbiology, in The Independent on Sunday two weeks ago that up to two million Britons could perish. The Secretariat also believes that a quarter of the country's workforce could fall ill, paralysing economic life. A senior government official told a private seminar in London last week: "It may be somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths and it may be 25 per cent of the population off work. That is the shape of the event we are going to have to deal with." He added that plans had been drawn up to confirm that emergency services and coroners had the staff and equipment to cope with such a crisis. Senior emergency planners said last week that they received official instructions at the end of last year to prepare for mass mortuaries to cope with a flu pandemic or a biological terrorism attack. They said that most police authority areas normally had emergency mortuaries to hold 100 to 200 bodies, but they had now been asked to make provision for up to 1,000. The authorities were now identifying greenfield sites and beginning to enter into contracts with firms to provide marquees and buildings to put on them. The planners said that these would be cooled to about the same temperature as household refrigerators, to store bodies. The scale of the preparation suggests that the Government fears that the 14.6 million doses of anti-viral drugs it has ordered may not arrive before a pandemic. Even in a year's time, less than half of the order will have been met. The drugs have been delayed partly because ministers waited for months before making the order. Last November an official flu exercise involving health bodies, emergency services and government - Exercise Icarus - identified the lack of anti-viral drugs as a key concern. The order was placed this month. Dr John Simpson, of the Health Protection Agency's emergency response division, said the Government was planning more exercises, including preventing public gatherings, to stop the disease spreading. Senior officials at the World Health Organisation (WHO) told the IoS that they predict the flu virus could circle the globe within two months. 27 March 2005 05:30 Search this site: Go Printable Story Independent Portfolio. Click here to find out more.

To: Henry Niman who wrote (29452)	3/27/2005 9:24:55 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 110194

China Shuts Down Blood Dealers to Curb AIDS Spread Fri Mar 25,12:25 AM ET Health - Reuters BEIJING (Reuters) - China's health ministry has closed 147 illegal blood collection agencies and arrested dozens of people since last May to prevent the spread of the virus that causes AIDS (news - web sites), the Xinhua news agency said. The central government had told local authorities to check blood collection and supply agencies more thoroughly to prevent illegal operations from resurfacing, it reported overnight. China had hundreds of blood collection and supply agencies, Xinhua said, without specifying how many were illegal under a law passed in August 2004 banning the buying and selling of blood. Blood stations in China are required to test for HIV (news - web sites), the virus that causes AIDS. But tens of thousands were infected with HIV in central China in the 1990s through local blood sales schemes that involved state-run health clinics, indicating a failure to properly screen donors. The ministry had set up a national task force to ensure a secure blood supply, Deputy Health Minister Ma Xiaowei was quoted as saying on Thursday. "Thirty people were arrested and 15 others were jailed," Ma said, adding that another 86 blood collection agencies and more than 100 people had been punished in the crackdown. China has been criticized for being slow to recognize its growing AIDS problem. The United Nations (news - web sites) has said the country could have as many as 10 million cases in 2010 if the epidemic is not taken seriously. At least 25,000 people, and perhaps as many as one million, in the central province of Henan were infected with HIV in the 1990s in blood-selling scandals that were initially covered up. Villagers were paid to give blood that was pooled and the plasma extracted for hospitals. The remainder of the blood was then returned to donors, to avoid anemia, meaning that one infected donor could pass the AIDS virus to the others. China, which recently has been raising the public profile of its fight against AIDS, says it has 840,000 HIV/AIDS cases. Experts believe the figure is more likely to be between one million and 1.5 million.