US Health Officials: How to Survive a Flu Pandemic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 2, 2007 -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the USA�s chief public health agency, has issued guidelines for flu pandemic survival.

The federal government released a 106-page document yesterday in an effort to help people in the US prepare for a global flu epidemic, considered by most specialists as inevitable.

It�s not a pretty picture the guidelines evoke: slightly paranoid and slightly antiquated. Isolation is a key-word; children would not go to school for about 3 months, people would not go to work anymore, or go to the mall on a whim or go to the movies or visit relatives.

Before a vaccine becomes available, if ever, these cautionary steps are to be taken. Live, and live in fear. The document outlines "non pharmaceutical interventions" against a virus that can be caught as easily as by standing near an infected person.

Throughout the 6 to eight-week duration of the pandemics people should be very careful not to interact more than is necessary.

People are advised to spend time only with close relatives and neighbors. No going to the hospital � the sick would be cared for at home unless near death. Houses inhabited by ill persons would be avoided.

Modern solutions: adults would work from their home-computer; children would stay at home and hand in whatever homework they would still do over the Internet. Prescription drugs would be prescribed liberally as preventive medicines in households where someone is sick.

There is the possibility of creating a government-woven safety that would provide food, personal care, and financial assistance to people who couldn't cope on their own.

To help states, cities, and towns decide when to employ various measures, the new document outlines a five-category system for grading pandemic severity that is analogous to the one used for hurricanes. Wind speed is the key variable in hurricanes; for pandemics it is "case fatality ratio."

Case fatality ratio is the fraction of ill people who die. In the epochal "Spanish influenza" of 1918, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, the ratio in the United States was about 2.2 percent. Without a good mitigation strategy, a 1918-type pandemic today would kill 1.8 million Americans. It would be a Category 5, the most serious.

In case of an epidemic, it would take months to develop a vaccine, and antiviral drugs are in short supply. The U.S. federal government has said repeatedly it could not help much.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has said: "As avian influenza slips from the headlines, people may begin to believe that the threat is no longer real." However, as people around the world are still contracting the disease, as birds continue to be sacrificed because they pose a threat to human safety, the general public should not consider that all is well.

Over-anxious or not, we all certainly want to live.

Author: Moni Constantinescu
Source: http://www.playfuls.com/