{"id":19825,"date":"2013-01-06T08:11:09","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T15:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/?p=19825"},"modified":"2013-01-06T08:24:35","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T15:24:35","slug":"vintage-big-med-d-newman-pandemic-revisited-sept-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/2013\/01\/vintage-big-med-d-newman-pandemic-revisited-sept-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Vintage Big Med – D Newman | Pandemic Revisited – Sept 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pandemic Revisited – David A H Newman<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

[Sep 6 07]<\/p>\n

The great flu pandemic of 2007 hasn\u2019t happened yet. But don\u2019t go away! The pandemic flu knows no seasons, and isn\u2019t a once-a-year event. Bird flu is spreading \u2013 mostly among birds so far, and in many places. What we don\u2019t know about it would fill volumes: we never know enough beforehand. That seems to be a law of nature. Grim scenarios might still happen.<\/p>\n

I wrote: \u201cEthics and Triage \u2013 A Nasty Scenario\u201d a few months ago, suggesting that even with the best of pandemic planning, our health care systems might become overwhelmed if one or more of the basic assumptions proves too optimistic. I received feedback suggesting that our propensity to go into \u2018feeding\u2019 frenzies when confronted with real or anticipated scarcities of anything \u2013 such as popularized toys or almost anything else \u2013 makes it inevitable that the \u2018nasty\u2019 scenarios, including riots and mayhem, are highly likely. In other words, the breakdown of civilized norms will surely accompany pandemic. My good friend Thomas Hobbes has described life in such circumstances as \u201cnasty, brutish, and short.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such frenzies could happen, and might happen here and there. However, the records of what happened in the London Plague of 1664-65 and what has happened since in times of war, pandemic, and disasters both natural and deliberate, including ice-storms, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados, suggest that we humans are amazingly resilient and will as a rule help each other. The folks who make up the \u2018grass-roots\u2019 in our communities, though usually ignored by the planners, are our great strength.<\/p>\n

Planning can help. Preparation, including training and education, can help greatly. First Responders are mightily needed. Central governments can play a key role in organizing supplies and logistics, and bringing in emergency legislation such as quarantines. But as we have seen time and again, it\u2019s the folks on the ground where and when \u2018it\u2019 happens, who must do the coping.<\/p>\n

The professionals can seldom get to the scene (or many scenes simultaneously) immediately. Sometimes it can take hours, days, and even weeks to get through the debris. Too often, the jurisdictional barriers are worse than the physical ones. Until the professionals arrive, people suffer and die without recourse other than helping themselves, and helping those around them. Sometimes, as in a pandemic, too many will suffer and die; regardless of what we do. But we must do what we can while we can.<\/p>\n

The more distant the authority, the longer the delay: the more immediate to the disaster, the quicker the response. Centralization has no place in disaster first response. Its main utility is in churning out press releases justifying its existence.<\/p>\n

We organize for disasters ass-forward and upside down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pandemic Revisited – David A H Newman [Sep 6 07] The great flu pandemic of 2007 hasn\u2019t happened yet. But don\u2019t go away! The pandemic flu knows no seasons, and isn\u2019t a once-a-year event. Bird flu is spreading \u2013 mostly among birds so far, and in many places. What we don\u2019t know about it would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[11553,11552,21631,11603],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19825"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19825"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19835,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19825\/revisions\/19835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}