Some States Not Stocking Up On Pandemic Medicines

Wyoming is among six states that received the lowest score for being prepared for a potential influenza pandemic.

A research group measured each state in ten categories.

The states that got the lowest score were Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nevada, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Seven states have yet to participate in a federal program to buy antivirals for a potential influenza pandemic. Wyoming is not among them.

The top states in being prepared are Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia.

Blogging about Pakistan’s Bird Flu

This is terrific! A blogger, blogging about bloggers who blog about bird flu.

Bird flu bloggers are busy writing about the outbreak in Pakistan, where eight people have been infected with bird flu and one has died. If bird flu morphs into a pandemic, easily spread human-to-human, the first hint of global peril may come from these bloggers.

The bird flu bloggers are not taking blood samples and culling chicken flocks in Indonesia or Pakistan. But they are good at tracking news, medical journal reports and official announcements to let their readers know what’s credible, new or bears watching. That is a valuable service.

Bird flu outbreaks generate hundreds of news items, many incomplete and sometimes contradictory. Knowing which sources are reliable, what information might be suspect and where government pressure may have had a role in the information flow, takes experience and the bird flu bloggers are getting plenty of it.

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Islamabad – Holidays Cancelled Over Bird Flu Threat

Dr Saeed Ahmed, senior director of the Capital Development Authority CDA, and District Health Services DHS has cancelled Eid holidays of the staff concerned because of threat of bird flu.

In a statement issued here on Wednesday, Dr Saeed said that directives had been issued to the staff concerned about cancellation of their holydays. The DHS has also launched a special fumigation campaign against the disease in various sectors of the city.

He said 35 poultry shops had been fumigated and an awareness campaign against the disease had been on, focusing on poultry farm workers and shopkeeper. He said poultry shops and kitchens in hotels should be covered up to keep flies away. He said the DHA had issued notices to 58 poultry shopkeepers because of poor hygienic condition and asked them to keep their shops clean. staff report

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Businesses Must Prepare Now for Flu Pandemic Outbreak

Pandemics are inevitable and businesses must prepare now by developing continuity plans in case of a flu outbreak, said Scott Mugno, managing director, corporate safety, health and fire protection at FedEx Express.

According to Mugno, pandemics will happen and have happened regularly throughout history. Some examples include the 1918 Spanish flu, responsible for 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide and 675,000 deaths in the United States; the 1957 Asian flu that caused one to four million deaths, 70,000 in the United States; and the 1968 Hong Kong flu also responsible for one to four million deaths, 34,000 within the United States. Not to mention the increasing cases of avian bird flu developing worldwide. It is necessary, he said, for businesses to have a continuity plan in place before the next major pandemic flu outbreak.

The term flu pandemic refers to a new influenza virus that people have little to no immunity to and there is no available vaccine, making a pandemic a global disease outbreak, said Mugno, during a recent webinar for the American Society of Safety Engineers ASSE, “Pandemic Influenza: Threat vs. Preparedness.

Currently, there is worldwide concern about the possible spread of the Avian H5N1 A H5N1 virus. The influenza A H5N1 virus raised concerns about a potential human pandemic because it is particularly potent. A H5N1 is spread by migratory birds and can be transmitted from birds to mammals and in some circumstances to humans. The virus continues to change and has a high death rate percentage in known human cases. As of Dec. 13, 2007, there are 339 known confirmed human cases of A H5N1 and 208 confirmed deaths, a fatality rate of 61 percent, according to the World Health Organization WHO.

However, Mugno said, “the A H5N1 may not be the pandemic flu. The key is for businesses and the public to stay informed and updated. Businesses need to teach awareness and take precautions now.”

Mugno said the key message from the U.S. government is, “given the magnitude of a severe pandemic influenza, individuals, families, businesses and local and state governments must prepare for the pandemic and not count on the federal government for a significant portion of support and relief.”

“Stay informed about the A H5N1 virus, especially if it evolves or mutates,” Mugno said. “Pay attention to news of doctors or nurses becoming infected, signs of clusters of infections, outbreaks in under developed areas or countries, news of quarantines, smuggling of birds, under reporting of H5N1 cases as well as expert consensus on precautions and tools. Stay informed and communicate, communicate, communicate.”

The economic and human impact of a possible pandemic is very costly. According to a March 2007 Trust for Americas Health Analysis, the U.S. economy could lose an estimated $683 billion, roughly 5.5 percent decline in annual GDP.

Key concerns of U.S. pandemic preparedness, according to Mugno, include lack of vaccine and vaccine production capability; inadequate capabilities to distribute vaccine and medical equipment; insufficient stockpile of antiviral drugs and other medical equipment; gaps in hospital and health care provider capacity to manage a surge of patients; a shortage in health care providers; and health insurance and workers comp issues; as well as the major threat to life.

Planning for an outbreak
The following are planning tips Mugno suggests on how businesses can prepare for a pandemic flu.

Establish trigger points to and checklists as waves of pandemic phases occur.
Review business demand shifts.
Prepare media point person for the pandemic.
Conduct company wide analysis of essential/nonessential functions.
Develop emergency corporate chain of command.
Develop essential contacts/relationships with governmental agencies.
Consider increasing security for warehouses and vehicles.
Develop procedures.
Develop plans to minimize the high potential for a fuel shortage.
Develop policies to address drivers/operators shortage.
Investigate the potential to secure housing for critical employees.
Develop cooperative arrangements with suppliers.

In addition, employers who are considering stockpiling antiviral drugs should plan for collaboration with state and local public health departments, comply with state and federal prescribing and dispensing laws and regulations, consider ethical and equity concerns as well as cost and logistical concerns, develop stockpiling and dispensing models and educate their employees.

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Australia – University Warns Pandemic Is Inevitable Advises 10 Week Stockpile of Food

Every Australian household should stockpile at least 10 weeks’ worth of food rations to prepare for a deadly flu pandemic, a panel of leading nutritionists has warned.

World health experts now agree a pandemic is inevitable and will spread rapidly, wiping out up to 7.4 million people globally and triggering rapid food shortages.

Australia is expected to be among the first countries hit because of its proximity to Asia and high levels of international traffic.

But Woolworths and Coles, the nation’s two major supermarket chains, will run out of stock within two to four weeks without a supply chain or even faster if shoppers panic.

This has prompted a team of leading nutritionists and dietitians from the University of Sydney to compile “food lifeboat” guidelines to cover people’s nutritional needs for at least 10 weeks.

Their advice published in the Medical Journal of Australia would allow citizens to stay inside their homes and avoid contact with infected people until a vaccine becomes available.

The lifeboat includes affordable long-life staples such as rice, biscuits, milk powder, Vegemite, canned tuna, chocolate, lentils, Milo and Weet-Bix.

Jennie Brand-Miller, professor of human nutrition at the University of Sydney and co-leader of the study, believes it is common sense to stockpile food before a pandemic strikes.

“It’s really not a question of if: it’s a question of when,” she said.

“We are going to have an epidemic. Chances are it will be avian flu (bird flu) but it might be something else.

“It will spread very rapidly just like flu does normally because it’s a highly contagious organism, except this will be a really lethal one. What we suffer from is a false sense of security that someone else is looking after all this.”

While there are emergency plans within governments, hospitals and the food industry, individuals will still need to take personal precautions in a disaster, she said.

The most important message for the Australian public is to avoid going out in public when the pandemic hits, the research found.

“We know that once it becomes a highly transmissable virus it will probably fly around the world within three weeks,” Prof Brand-Miller said.

“We know it’s got all the right conditions to start in Indonesia or Asia and there have already been human transmissions.

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6 Pakistanis Infected, 1 Fatally With H5N1 Bird Flu

Pakistan says six people caught the deadly strain of bird flu in the northern part of the country last month, and at least one person with it has died.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that all six cases were positive for the H5N1 strain of the virus in preliminary testing. But it says a second round of analysis is being conducted to make sure.

If confirmed, the infections would be the first in humans in South Asia.

Pakistans Health Ministry says five people had fully recovered, but one died in a hospital and his brother, who could not be tested, also died. It did not explain why the brother could not be tested.

The virus has killed more than 200 people worldwide since it began afflicting Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. Most of the human cases have been reported in Indonesia and Vietnam. But yesterday, the WHO confirmed the first case in Myanmar.

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Hoover Classrooms Sanitized After Teacher Dies of MRSA

Parents at Herbert Hoover Middle School in Potomac say they are confident the school is taking proper precautions after a special education teacher died Sunday night as a result of a drug-resistant strain of staph infection.

‘‘I’m a nurse, and I don’t want to blow this out of proportion,” said Clara Stanton, a parent of a seventh-grader at the school. ‘‘[My daughter] is not worried, and I’m not going to scare her.”

The school is being sanitized after Silver Spring resident Merry King, who taught a class of 26 students at the school, died in the hospital Sunday from complications due to methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. King had been absent from the school since Nov. 30 and hospitalized since last week, according to Kate Harrison, a spokeswoman for Montgomery County Public Schools. King had taught with MCPS for three years.

In a letter sent home with parents Monday, Principal Billie-Jean Bensen said she did not think the teacher’s illness was contracted at the school.

PTA President Geri Shapiro said parents trust that Bensen is doing her best to protect Hoover students.

‘‘They are confident that Billie-Jean [Bensen] is doing everything in her power and the school’s power to ensure that the safety of the children is the number one priority,” Shapiro said.

MRSA made headlines in October after more than two dozen cases were reported in Montgomery County Public Schools. Staph bacteria are most commonly transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, especially through openings in the skin like cuts or scrapes.

Harrison said she did not know where King had acquired the infection, but that she had no reason to believe it was at the school. As a precautionary measure, Harrison said the classroom where King taught was cleaned, and that common areas are being sanitized with a bleach solution.

Stanton said she felt a sense of relief that the school was being sanitized.

‘‘I think the school is going to behave in the right way,” she said.

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1000 Infected With Virulent Virus That Starts Out Like Common Cold

More than a thousand people in four states have been infected with a virulent virus whose symptoms start out like a common cold but sometimes end in death, according to The Washington Post.

The paper says at least 10 people have been killed by a variant of the strain known as adenovirus 14.

“Health officials say the virus does not seem to be causing life-threatening illness on a wide scale, and most people who develop colds or flulike symptoms are at little or no risk,” the Post reports. “Likewise, most people infected by the suspect adenovirus do not appear to become seriously ill. But the germ appears to be spreading, and investigators are unsure how much of a threat it poses.”

The paper says infections have been reported in Texas, Washington, South Carolina and New York. Last month, a Los Angeles Times report said that 106 soldiers contracted the virus at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. One died, the paper says.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says a recent research report: showed that Ad14 is a rarely reported but emerging serotype of adenovirus that can cause severe and sometimes fatal respiratory disease in people of all ages, including healthy young adults. However, Ad 14 infections are uncommon. Most infections from Ad14 are not serious, and severe or fatal outcomes from Ad14 are rare. Thus, the public should not be concerned about the emergence of Ad14.

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CDC Checklist Helps Companies Plan For Flu Pandemic

Has your company formulated a plan for coping with a flu pandemic?

Preparing for a flu pandemic is a high-priority task at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s primary agency for protecting the health and safety of Americans.

I visited the CDC’s gleaming headquarters campus last week with nine other health-care journalists. We came as part of the Midwest Health Journalism Program fellowship at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. The program is sponsored by the Associationof Health Care Journalists, which is based at the school.

The CDC was founded in 1946 in Atlanta as the Communicable Disease Center. Its role then was to control malaria. In the decades since, its mission has expanded to include the prevention and control of other infectious diseases, chronic conditions, injuries, workplace hazards, disabilities and environmental health threats.

The campus, which is next to Emory University, houses about 4,000 scientists and other health specialists. Many of them spend their time analyzing what could happen if there was a repeat of the global medical disaster that occurred at the end of World War I. That’s when the “Spanish Flu” killed between 20 million and 40 million people, including about 675,000 Americans.

“Our big concern is it will be like 1918 and millions of people will die,” Ralph O’Connor, the CDC’s lead public health advisor, told our group. “It would be a nightmare.”

And it would wrench our lives in ways that we can hardly imagine. Schools would close, and children would have to stay home. Unlike on snow days, the kids wouldn’t be able to go to shopping malls, which would be off limits to everyone. If the children are young, someone would have to stay home from work with them — maybe for a long time.

It’s hard to envision hard-charging, multitasking Americans retreating into this kind of a shadow-world. Yet it’s better than the alternative. O’Connor recalled that during the 1918 pandemic, the city of St. Louis virtually shut down, and the death rate dropped. Around the same time, the bold residents of Philadelphia held a patriotic parade, and flu deaths shot up.

It goes without saying that a flu pandemic would pulverize our economy.

We can’t make our society pandemic-proof, but there are things we can do to blunt the effect. The CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, its parent agency, have created a list of steps that large businesses should take to make it through this potential health catastrophe. They include:

•Identify a pandemic coordinator or team responsible for preparendness and response planning.

•Implement guidelines to modify the frequency and type of face-to-face contact, such as hand-shaking and shared work stations, among employees and between employees and customers.

•Establish policies for a flexible worksite, such as telecommuting and staggered shifts.

•Train and prepare a back-up work force, which may include contractors and retirees.

•Determine the potential effect of a pandemic on the company’s financials using multiple scenarios that would affect different product lines and production sites.

•Establish an emergency communications plan and revise it periodically.

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Bracing For The Inevitable Influenza Pandemic

Among health experts, the question is not if but when an influenza pandemic will happen, and officials are assembling a regional plan to handle a future outbreak.

In case all this sounds scary, Berkshire County officials looking back on history  say it is smart to plan ahead.

The inevitability factor is based on three worldwide flu outbreaks in the 20th century: the so-called Spanish flu in 1918-19, the Asian flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69. Each of the outbreaks accounted for at least tens of thousands of deaths worldwide.

Similar planning efforts are under way across the country: setting up a system to react quickly to an outbreak, ensuring that enough hospital beds are available for those who need them, having enough volunteers ready to help with the sick, and delivering medicine and supplies to the homebound.

Planning efforts here are based on projections that a virus would infect 2 million Massachusetts residents and require the hospitalization of 80,000 over the course of two or three months. In addition, planning will take into account that 30 to 40 percent of the working-age population
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would be ill, creating a massive vacuum in services.

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