January 9 Flu Update
Update on Update: China is reporting that a farmer caught H5N1 but has recovered and been released from the hospital. Interesting that there was no word until well after it had happened. This will start people to wondering. Of course, it would have been surprising if there hadn't been a case...implausibly, the Chinese report no poultry outbreaks in the area.The Indonesian cases (2) that we mentioned yesterday are both confirmed H5N1.
ProMed on Indonesia.
World Bank article on newly pledged funds and its usage.
Another province in the Mekong Delta has been hit by bird flu.
Revere blogs the Computer World article, along with his personal experience doing bird flu planning at his own university. Excellent as always--note below.
There are also some lessons for the rest of us. One I see close up in our own efforts. The minute you start to dig beneath the surface and begin to imagine the interlocking chain of consequences of an interrupted supply chain or a 40% absenteeism the problem starts to look hopeless and insurmountable. With the uncertainty about when and if a pandemic will occur, the natural way to handle this is to procrastinate. It's overwhelming. But there's really quite a lot that can be done if you don't let the enormity of the overall problem make you choke. Even if you only manage 60% to 80% of the challenge of a pandemic, that's a life saving fraction and likely a business saving one, too.
Readers in South Central Texas get some suspect info on bird flu.
FAO has selected a bird flu detection program.
This is odd----the London Telegraph says that poultry workers are being given flu shots this winter--to forestall the spread of the bird flu.
The World Bank is supporting bird flu work in Bangladesh.
UNICEF is at work in Vietnam.
The Philippines are holding a media training session to improve coverage of the bird flu issue. (Could we do that in the US?)
Readers in Sault Saint Marie (Ontario) are urged to look at the province's pandemic preparedness guide.
posted by Orange @ 10:57 PM
1 Comments:
Orange;
Just a couple of quick comments on your news articles today.
First, Effective Measure’s article – “Bird Flu: paying the premium”. I believe that the Revere who wrote it, could have done a little better job. What I mean is it’s perfectly okay to highlight cross-training roles and responsibilities, e-learning tools, etc – this is all relatively straight forward intuitive simple stuff, but the real issues with IT networks are: redundancy network systems, backup servers, emergency power to run equipment, and my favorite, flexible firewalls that can be dismantled quickly to allow convenient off-site access. I have said this before numerous times… people, businesses and the government do not truly understand how vulnerable they are, and how tremendously fragile these systems and processes are, until the financial electronic systems shut down, electronic inventory and delivery systems cease, phone switching systems become inoperable, critical data is lost and the internet ceases to function. Virtually every thing driven by electronics is vulnerable and subject to disruption – gas pumps, utilities, even getting the problem with you car diagnosed on a computer. These impacts are realistically what we might expect, and quickly, components will grind to a halt. During a moderate or severe pandemic – everybody is gonna be lucky if their cell phone works for a period of time.
Now the Reuters article: “China reports first human bird flu case in months”. So this all occurred in December 2006, and they just now feel magnanimous enough to report it, after the fact ? Anybody out there feel this is a little backwards and upset? Gag me with an old sock, folks, this is just plain wrong. I can’t help but feel we actually are going to have to see the dead Chinese flopping over by the thousands, before they will admit to anything publicly. Margie Chan – get to work on your relatives please. Somebody grow a backbone and get on to these countries.
Lastly, I’m not a great fan of the UN in general, but they have some aspects that are functional and worthy of recognition. Especially those FAO and UNICEF education and poultry reimbursement programs. They are great, I’ve seen these UNICEF folks in action overseas and they deserve tremendous praise. Note to everybody though – I have also seen the UN “peace keepers” who have been deployed in various parts of the world and they are entirely useless and a waste of money. The UN would be better off sending in a bunch of eunuch monks with sharpened pencils from a monastery.
Wulfgang
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