Swine Flu Info Blog

2 comments:

starligh said...

No there aren’t enough supplies, and since the virus has killed 78% of the patients who have been infected over the last six months it’s a terribly important.
First there is no vaccine to prevent the illness – they can’t produce a vaccine until the pandemic starts – the virus is still mutating and a vaccine must be custom made. It will take at least 6 to 9 months to produce vaccine and then it will be in small amounts at first – probably for health care workers, firefighters, police, etc.
Our stockpile of the antiviral medication Tamiflu is very small, and we are sure to run out of that very quickly.
We don’t have extra hospital beds for flu patients. Even discharging every patient who is in the hospital and could possibly go home won’t provide enough beds. The U.S. government has said that most pandemic flu patients will be cared for in the home by family members.
I don’t know how many ventilators Australia has, but in the U.S. we have approx 110,000 and approx 100,000 are in use everyday. There will be a severe shortage of vents.
Medication – for pandemic flu patients and meds that people take everyday – will be in short supply. Our hospitals and pharmacies operate in a “just-in-time” delivery system. Medication is delivered to most hospitals twice or three times a day. There aren’t stockpiles in pharmacies and hospitals. We’ll be using more medication and it’s likely that our transportation system will grind to a stop. We’ll run out of meds quickly.
The personal protective equipment (ppe) that health care workers will need to take care of pandemic flu patients is in very short supply as well. They will need respirators (not surgical masks), gloves, goggles, gowns, shoe covers and head coverings. They’ll go through these things in incredible numbers. Most hospitals don’t have a supply to last more than a day or two.
Since they won’t have ppe, health care workers will be infected at a rate even higher than the general population. This will be a new virus so we will have no immunity – everyone exposed to the virus is likely to be infected. The infection rate among the general public may be as high as 60% or possibly higher. Health care workers will be infected in even larger numbers. We’ll experience a terrible shortage of health care workers, and some states in the U.S. are actually looking for volunteers to assist.
In addition to all of this we’ll be told that we must stay in our homes to try to reduce the attack rate (number of people who are infected) In the U.S. schools will close for at least three months if the virus remains as lethal as it is now.
People should be stockpiling food, baby food, pet food, medicine, cleaning supplies, etc. The government called on people to start doing this at least a year ago checkout their website www.pandemicflu.gov Unfortunately they aren’t publicizing this – I haven’t got a clue why.
Also some of the prep websites say food for a week or two. If you’re going to be in your home for an extended time during a pandemic (like possibly 3 months) and you’d like to eat during that extended time, a larger supply of food is necessary. No one will be bringing food house to house.
A lot could be done if the governments got serious about stockpiling food, medicines, ppe, etc, and if they told people more clearly that we need to prepare. At this point none of us who research avian flu/pandemic flu are the least bit impressed.

July 11, 2009 at 5:24 PM

WP Robot Wordpress Autoposter said...

It depends on what exactly the pandemic is and what is the preferred treatment.
One good thing is that Australia is a very large land mass with people spread out. The greatest break-outs would be in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Darwin, if it made it up that far. Most likely they could get the medicines flown in within a few days if the surrounding countries were not yet infected. Even if they were Australia is going to get medicine before Indonesia or New Guinea and this is just a economic reality.

July 11, 2009 at 6:36 PM