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pandemic
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WASHINGTON: The US government may be urging local officials and hospitals to get ready for a bird flu pandemic, but top hospital executives said on Tuesday they cannot do everything that is being called for. "If the federal government doesn't help run this, it really isn't going to go well," Dr Frank Peacock, who heads emergency preparedness at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told a conference. The H5N1 avian flu virus has picked up speed in birds, spreading to 20 new countries in the past six weeks. It cannot yet infect people easily, but it has killed 109 of the 194 confirmed infected with H5N1 in nine countries. A few changes would allow the virus to evolve into a form passed easily from human to human, triggering what experts say would be a devastating pandemic. "We don't know when it will come. But |
we do know that we are overdue and underprepared," US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the emergency preparedness conference sponsored by US News & World Report magazine. Experts say the US and other countries have too few drugs, supplies such as latex gloves, or even equipment such as ventilators to deal with a pandemic of a respiratory virus. Leavitt said people need to be prepared on an individual and local level and cannot expect much immediate help from the federal government. "There is no way you can respond to every home town at the same time," he said. Maybe hospitals should be allocating money to buy ventilators instead of remodeling facilities such as swimming pools, Leavitt said. Peacock said even large centres such as his lack the funding to do so. |
"I think it is a good thing for the Secretary to say we have to stockpile ventilators. But I think a lot of us know we don't have the resources to buy another two, three, four hundred ventilators." "We may not have the staff needed to run those ventilators adequately," said Vicki Running, who heads disaster planning at Stanford University Medical Centre in California. Day-to-day business is already overwhelming hospitals, according to Running. "We are operating at capacity," she said. Dr Edward Miller, chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, said the Baltimore hospital and medical school had already spent US$10 million (RM36.7 million) preparing for a pandemic or other emergency. "This is not a sustainable business plan," he said. Reuters
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