Pueblog USa
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Be Prepared
Welcome to the Boy Scouts!
There is an interesting interesting article in the Pueblo Chieftain today. It’s about plans to prepare for the arrival of Avian Flu, a.k.a. bird flu.
Personal preparedness will be a big part of surviving a possible flu pandemic, Dr. Chris Nevin-Woods of the City-County Health Department told a group of community representatives at a breakfast meeting Friday.
Welcome to the Boy Scouts, whose motto has always been “Be Prepared!”
I’ve been wondering about the ‘bird flu’ business and how the county was planning on preparing for its eventual arrival here. It’s good to see someone is paying attention, as I agree with last week’s reports that we’ll have the virus amongst us with this Fall’s southerly migration of all the birds that will confab above the Arctic Circle this Summer. Lots of birds from Europe and North America will mingle up there this Summer and in the course of that, I’m confident that the heretofore unphased North Americans will contract the virus and bring it south on their Fall migration to warmer climes. Then we’ll be in it like the rest of the world. Barring something about inter-species gatherins we’re not familiar with up there. Maybe we’ll be lucky. But I wouldn’t count on it.
I’d rather be prepared….
The health department has been planning for a pandemic for several months, in meetings with other government agencies and medical providers. There will be a tabletop exercise in coming months, and the department plans a mass flu vaccine clinic to provide shots to 10,000 people on Dec. 2.
Actually, there’s already an on-going pandemic. So far it’s primary impact is upon birds. However, considering reports that the Swine Flu human pandemic of 1918 is actually the same flu as the birds are experiencing now, and that this current bird flu apparently can jump to pigs and cats, there’s a good chance it can, once again, jump to humans.
As it is right now, we can expect the price of chicken to go up as the birds are culled, en massé. Maybe even the price of pork, if the virus successfully jumps to pigs in our factory-esque pig farms, forcing mass culls there as well.
I’m not too sure of the impact on cat prices, as I don’t have many recipes for them.
Although there isn’t a vaccine yet for the avian flu that is considered the most likely candidate to become a pandemic, Nevin-Woods said ordinary flu shots may confer some protection against the bird flu. In the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, she noted, more young people died than older people, and scientists speculate that the reason might be that older people had survived more unrelated infections and developed more immunities.
This is probably true. The human body’s fantastic immune system learns to deal with different bugs over the life-span of the individual. Youngsters, although equipped with a very robust immune system, may not have had the necessary exposure to help them through a particularly vicious bout with a flu bug. It’s hard to say, as we won’t REALLY know until we’re into the mess. And even then, we won’t know for sure until the statistics are talleyed afterwards.
Again, the best thing is to “Be Prepared.”
If a pandemic comes to Pueblo, she said, people ideally should be prepared to stay in their own homes for two to three weeks. Public health officials might have to close schools and public gathering places, and that could include the mall and even grocery stores.
“So you would think you’d need food, but you also need to think about having enough dog food, toilet paper, things for the family to do if they can’t leave the house, and preparation to take care of yourself if you get sick or hurt,” she said.
It would be great if it only lasted two or three weeks. However, it could last longer. It’s going to depend on a lot of factors. Many of which are human factors. Things that we don’t usually think about regarding simple habits of cleanliness and selflessness all too few of us abide by. [Note: I’ll address some of those matters later.]
As for the necessity to hole-up in ones house for weeks, that’s going to require a bit more planning than most people are familiar with. I think it would be a good idea for the City-County Public Health Department to publish a thorough document on what people should be planning to stock in by this September. This, from a logistician’s perspective, is a rather formidable collection of materials; food, clothing, medical supplies, replacement parts for household equipment that might fail, e.g., light bulbs, heaters, etc.
Again, “Be Prepared.” [Note: More on that later too.]
“How many of us would know what to do if your child fell and broke his arm? Could you splint it if you couldn’t get to the doctor for two or three days?”
Not only broken bones but bad burns, cuts, splinters, etc., etc., etc.
If the hospitals are full of people coughly their lungs out with a good chance of dying, nobody in their right mind is going to want to visit one with anything less than a life-threatening situation.
We might see a need for doctors to start making house-calls again. As the risk of infection from one person coming to a house to treat an accident is less than going into a doctor’s office full of coughing people. [Note: This brings to mind another pet-issue of mine regarding the current state of the medical industry. We don’t have enough doctors. But that’s another essay. I’ll address it later.]
The health department has a grant to make a video to help with individual and community preparedness, and it will be shared with other health departments across the state, she said.
The good doctor is correct, people are going to need to be trained to help themselves for most emergencies.
A video would be nice. However, the best form of training for first aid is hands-on/performance-oriented training.
The distaff and I were discussing this and she’s of an opinion that the City-County Public Health Department should get the public schools involved by having first-aid training programs run in them over the course of this Summer to help teach the people how to do the things they’re going to have to learn to do.
Another suggestion would be for the public schools to modify their educational program for this Fall to teach first aid to every middle and high school student as the first series of classes in August. This also applies to all the community colleges and CSU-P.
She also hopes to organize a medical reserve corps of trained volunteers who could help with disease prevention efforts as well as response to medical emergencies.
If you want a solid group of people to call upon for this medical reserve corps, I HIGHLY recommend teaching the middle and high schoolers and college students too. Not to mention any adults, as mentioned above.
Other planning groups will be set up to think through issues in new ways.
A suggestion here would be to make any videos available on the internet for download.
PDF documents do not take up a lot of space and can include images, sound/voice as well as movies to pass information on ‘how-to’ do something, e.g., splint a simple fracture, treat a burn, change a medical dressing, etc., etc., etc. Simple documents could be prepared and put up on the web where people could get them via download.
For people who do not have internet access, the more expensive to produce and distribute video tapes or DVDs could be used.
“The hardest part of the mindset changes we need is how to deal with everything ourselves, in our own community,” Nevin-Woods said. “There would be some tough decisions, for example, when we can’t send the sickest children to Denver like we do now - if you have 70 children who need to be on respirators and there are only four or five in town.”
This is going to be a challenge for American inginuity. And I think we can rise to it. After all, some bright medic in Iraq built a life-saving incubator system to help keep patients warm out of a blow dryer, a tube and a plastic bag. I think we could come up with something to do this sort of thing if we had too. And we just might have to. So someone should start coming up with ideas, in order to “Be Prepared”.
The federal department of Health and Human Services is setting up state summits on pandemic planning, and the Colorado summit will be March 24 in Denver.
Might be nice to sit in on that.
To this point, there is no federal planning money, but Nevin-Woods said she understands there will be at least some federal funding.
I still have trouble understanding why everything we do must be federally funded.
Seriously. If my life is on the line, I’m not going to wait for someone from the government to tell me what to do, or give me the money to do it. Just earlier in this article we were told we were going to have to fend for ourselves. We may as well get used to that idea and start acting on it now, instead of waiting for the federal government to decide it’s time to help us here in Pueblo.
Following the course of bird flu across Asia and into Europe, Nevin-Woods said it now appears infected birds might reach Alaska in April or May and the continental United States in the fall.
As I was saying earlier. We’ve got several months in which to prepare to “Be Prepared.” We shouldn’t waste that time.
“We need to let people know that you’re not likely to be exposed unless you’re actually handling birds, slaughtering them and being exposed to the blood,” she said. There is no evidence yet that the virus has mutated to the point that it can easily spread from human to human. That would be the critical point signaling a pandemic.
Actually, I think it’s more extensive than that. The virus, according to reports, is also found in bird droppings. That means if you’ve got pigeons nesting in the vicinity of your house, you’re at risk.
I’m going to have to do something about that pair that has been nesting in the eaves of my house this last year.
Anybody got any recipes for squab?
If a pandemic does strike, Nevin-Woods said, “The assumption is that 30 percent of the population would become ill. That would be 45,000 people in Pueblo County, and it could mean 22,000 clinic visits, 4,500 hospital admissions including 720 intensive-care cases and 360 people needing ventilators - and 960 deaths.”
This may vary, depending on the nature of the mutation that allows the virus to attack human to human via coughing. Right now, the mortality rate amongst humans who contract the disease is pushing 50%. But that’s among people who have regular close contact with diseased birds. They are geting quite a dose of the bug. People who do not get a heavy dose of the virus particles have a better chance of surviving.
But, we can’t tell what a new mutation of this virus will do to its virility, survivability or mortality rate. So….as the good doctor said….
....BE PREPARED.
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