How to Write an Emergency Plan by David Alexander

Author:David Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dunedin Academic Press Ltd
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pandemic response planning

This section concentrates primarily on possible strategies to plan a response to an influenza pandemic. This is the archetypical form of massive international disease outbreak that occurs suddenly or very rapidly. Endemic and persistent diseases such as HIV-AIDS are disasters in their own right, but they require measures that are mostly outside the scope of this book.

With vast increases in world population and international travel, plus considerable disruption caused by conflict and exploitation of human beings, such as people trafficking, the opportunities for a major sudden-impact pandemic have never been as high as they are now. On the other hand, advances in medical science and international co-ordination of disease control measures have created the conditions in which, if there is sufficient intervention, cooperation and initiative, a pandemic could be controlled. The ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (which originated in China, not Spain) killed millions of people, some historians suggest 50 million. However, populations were exhausted by the devastations caused by the First World War, and medical responses were primitive by modern standards. Nevertheless, pandemic influenza can be extremely lethal. It can mutate and spread easily, effective vaccines will not be available for months, and the disease targets young, previously healthy people. Accounts of the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic describe horrendous scenes of uncontrollable mortality and massive disruption accompanied by acute fear of contamination, moreover in bouts that occurred simultaneously on different continents.

Pandemic emergency planning is a controversial topic in which some of the measures are hotly contested. For example, stockpiling prophylactic drugs such as Tamiflu has been variously described as a vital insurance measure and a colossal waste of resources. One thing that health authorities agree on is that something needs to be done to prepare. Influenza pandemics have a cycle of recurrence of about 35–40 years. Because the virus mutates to the point that existing vaccines are of no use, it cannot be said that the risks have been reduced to nothing by the advancement of medical science.

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