Why Care, Why Prepare?
I'm participating in the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog over the next several weeks and just blogged my first post with this title. Here's an excerpt:
For me, it’s pretty simple. Here’s the bad news:
1. There will be a pandemic eventually.
2. Hospitals and our health care system may not work.
3. Depending on the timing of #1, and the severity of #2, there may not be vaccines or treatment produced or available.
Read and comment on the full post here.
Comments
I love Vinay's How to Live Wiki for thinking through these issues. He's one of the people I'd want on my island if the rest of the world were suddenly dying.
Popping in because I've been thinking about you the past few weeks with this new strain of TB that's threatening to become more of a nightmare in Africa than the AIDs pandemic, and it's potential to become the kind of global nightmare you were talking about nearly two years ago when you'd attended one particular conference.
SARS hit when my mum was in the hospital dying, and the consequences of that have never allowed me to rest easily since. Our lives were turned upside-down in a heartbeat because no one was prepared. The issues you're addressing in your blog about an inevitable flu pandemic are entirely too real, and undoubtedly as close as next year, as you've suggested may be the case. Glad to see you remain entrenched in this in a position of leadership, because the attention given to preparing for it seems dwarfed against the current runaway trains that caught us off guard the past two decades.
The greatest wisdom in your posting is your encouragement of families and communities to prepare at a personal level, anticipating that our infrastructure will let us down. Having lived through this in 2003 when mum was passing, I know this to be a truth, and I'm glad to hear that you are advocating on this level. People do need to take personal responsibility for preparing, and to make this an urgent mission. It's not fear mongering. It's common sense.
Thanks, Pierre, for continuing to poke this with a stick. It's a discourse that I hope gets scaled far beyond where it's at now. Going to point back to this in my own blogs, as I think it's at that grassroots level that this will become viral, no pun intended.
[b]Good thoughts to you as always,[/b]
[b]Sue.[/b]
well from my point of view, living in PERTH, Western Australia, we are very isolated.. we have a healthy pouring in of international students studying at our universities, from China, HK, M'sia, Indonesia to name a few. If this were to hit our shores, we'd be stuffed.. why? as it stands there isn't enough room in our pubilc hospitals, we do have private hospitals but if it was anything as serious as bird flu it would be push to the state hospitals anyway. There is a shortage in nurses and doctors, every year our government offer positions to Dr who come in from all over the world to work here, but still its just enough for the status quo. Not epidemics.