Advertisement Worldwide, millions of people could die, and millions more could become sick in an event that could last up to 12 weeks. It could create panic and chaos as people scramble for medication, food and water.
It is not a terrorist attack or the plague.
This scenario could be the next flu pandemic.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said a new pandemic is on the horizon, but no one knows when it is coming or what strain of flu virus will cause it.
“We take it very seriously,” Gerberding said, adding the national strategy is to “save lives and sustain a civil society” during a pandemic.
Michael Osterholm, who was part of a CDC team working on bioterrorism preparedness, said the next pandemic could be much worse than the 1918 pandemic because today the world has seven times the population and much faster travel for spreading of the virus. He puts the potential death toll at 300 million worldwide.
Gerberding and Osterholm were among the speakers Sept. 4 at a national conference on preparing for the pandemic threat held at Logistics Health in La Crosse.
The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 caused up to 40 million deaths worldwide.
After an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, Osterholm said, he was overwhelmed with e-mails from two extreme views: those saying he was Chicken Little needlessly scaring people, and those asking why prepare because we’re all going to die anyway.
“Hope and despair are not strategies,” Osterholm said.
Osterholm, director of the infectious disease and research center at the University of Minnesota, said we must approach preparations for a pandemic like a chess master who sees eight to 10 moves down the board.
“Most local, state and federal exercises have assumed the pandemic will occur in an otherwise normal world,” he said. “This is a serious mistake.”
If businesses and agencies have not planned for collateral damage of the next pandemic, they have a lot of work to do, Osterholm said. In a pandemic, “business as usual will not apply, and there will be winners and losers.”
He said flu pandemic plans are too focused on resources, such as gloves, rubber masks, ventilators and hospital bed capacity. “We won’t have resources, and every local community will be on their own,” Osterholm said.
“We’re not planning for that right now,” he said.
Osterholm said critical products and services will dramatically impact a pandemic.
Food, water and basic prescription drugs will be hard to get due to problems with supplies and transportation, he said. Most products are made overseas, he said, so the food chain could be interrupted and countries could close their borders during a pandemic.
If the resources exist, they could be exhausted when the first wave of the pandemic hits, while the second wave could be worse, Osterholm said.
“You could see the food system come to its knees quickly,” he said, adding that diesel fuel would quickly run out in a pandemic.
Railroads, freighters and coal producers and their workers need to be protected, or else the transportation and electrical power systems could fail, Osterholm said. He said not much coal is stockpiled; sometimes the United States has only days of coal supply on hand.
He said a health care worker shortage will occur during a pandemic because many will be sick, and almost half of those workers said they would not come to work due to concern for their safety and that of their family.
Gerberding said CDC officials have been preparing for a flu pandemic and monitoring the bird flu virus, which may or may not be the virus that causes the next pandemic.
The bird flu virus, a distant relative of the 1918 flu virus, had a death rate of 63 percent among the 385 cases reported worldwide since 2003.
Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services and now president of Logistics Health, told attendees at the Sept. 4 conference that agencies and organizations often postpone planning if a situation is not an immediate crisis.
“That’s at our peril,” he said.
When he was secretary, Thompson said, U.S. health officials were on top of SARS and no one died of the virus in the United States. “It can show you what planning can do,” he said.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, federal, state and local officials have been putting together plans to better prepare for a terrorist attack, flu pandemic or any disaster.
Doug Mormann, director of the La Crosse County Health Department, has led flu pandemic and public health emergency planning for the Coulee Region Public Health Consortium.
“We’re never going to be as prepared as we need to be, but we’ve made progress by leaps and bounds,” Mormann said.
LOCAL PREPARATIONS FOR A FLU PANDEMIC
Coulee Region Public Health Consortium, made up of members from Buffalo, Jackson, La Crosse, Monroe and Trempealeau counties and the Ho-Chunk Nation, has been meeting once a month for the past five years, working on local public health emergency plans and coordinating efforts to better respond to bioterrorism, a flu pandemic and other disasters. Many health care and emergency workers have received training.
Each county is developing its own flu pandemic plan. Laura Gambino, director of public health nursing for La Crosse County, said the county has a flu pandemic committee and subcommittees made up of community members.
The consortium has had several tabletop exercises on emergency plans. The consortium held one large exercise in 2005 at the La Crosse Center as part of the public flu immunization clinics. An exercise in setting up a mass clinic for an anthrax outbreak is scheduled Thursday.
Hospitals are investing in preparations for a flu pandemic and coordinating plans with distributors and suppliers of needed medical supplies. Marilyn Michels, Gundersen Lutheran nurse epidemiologist and chairwoman of the regional hospital emergency preparedness planning, said hospitals have been tracking bed capacity and other data.
Western Technical College has trained 1,000 respiratory therapists from around the state on the use of ventilators, said Bob Milisch, head of the school’s respiratory therapist program and a member of the state expert panel on ventilators.
Milisch has helped assess the number of ventilators statewide and the need in a pandemic. He also has been working on protocols for health care workers and the public. An exercise on ventilators is scheduled later this year.
