Prepared Citizens

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

  • Previous Posts

  • Michael Osterholm Quotes:

    “What we need to be doing now is the basic planning of how we get our communities through 12 to 18 months of a pandemic.”

    “Ninety-five out of 100 will live. But with the nation in crisis, will we have food and water? Are we going to have police and security? Will people come to work at all?”

    “It's the perfect setup. Then you put air travel in and it could be around the world overnight.”

    “We can predict now 12 to 18 months of stress of watching loved ones die, of wondering if you are going to have food on the table the next day. Those are all things that are going to mean that we are going to have to plan -- unlike any other crisis that we have had in literally the last 80-some years in this country.”

  • US Health and Human Services

    Secretary Michael Leavitt

    "If there is one message on pandemic preparedness that I could leave today that you would remember, it would be this:

    Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government or for that matter the state government will be able to step forward and come to their rescue at the final hour will be tragically wrong,

    not because government will lack a will, not because we lack a collective wallet, but because there is no way that you can respond to every hometown in America at the same time."

  • Joseph C. Napoli, MD of Resiliency LLC

    "I think a new meaning is evolving for resiliency and resilience.

    In some contexts the words are being used to mean the strength to resist being impacted by an adverse event rather than either the “capacity to rebound” or “act of rebounding” from adversity.

    Therefore, resiliency and resilience appear to be assuming the meaning of fortitude, that is, “the strength or firmness of mind that enables a person to encounter danger with coolness and courage or to bear pain or adversity without despondency” as defined in the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

    If so, we are coming full circle with science accepting a religious moral virtue – fortitude – as written in the Bible’s Book of Wisdom"




  • Faith Based Resources

    John Piper
    Jonathan Edwards
    Reformation
    Pink-Saving Faith
    Pink-Christian Ethics

    "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves"
    (2 Corinthians 13:5).

    Why Faith Groups Must Care

    When the Darkness Will Not Lift by John Piper

    Stand

    Be Not Afraid
    Overcoming the fear of Death
    by Johann Christoph Arnold






    While I am not a professional journalist, I do embrace the code of ethics put forth by the Society of Professional Journalists and the statement of purpose by the Association of Health Care Journalists and above all else I strive to "do no harm".


  • Recent Comments

    preparedcitizens on Faith Statement
    Joe on Faith Statement
    preparedcitizens on About/Bio
    Heather Siebens on About/Bio
    preparedcitizens on Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH…
  • Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.

  • Definitions

    from Wikipedia



    Pandemic Influenza


    An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of the influenza virus that spreads on a worldwide scale and infects a large proportion of the human population.

    In contrast to the regular seasonal epidemics of influenza, these pandemics occur irregularly, with the 1918 Spanish flu the most serious pandemic in recent history.

    Pandemics can cause high levels of mortality, with the Spanish influenza being responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people.

    There have been about 3 influenza pandemics in each century for the last 300 years. The most recent ones were the Asian Flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong Flu in 1968.



    Seasonal Influenza


    Flu season is the portion of the year in which there is a regular outbreak in flu cases.

    It occurs during the cold half of the year in each hemisphere.

    Flu activity can sometimes be predicted and even tracked geographically. While the beginning of major flu activity in each season varies by location, in any specific location these minor epidemics usually take about 3 weeks to peak and another 3 weeks to significantly diminish.

    Individual cases of the flu however, usually only last a few days. In some countries such as Japan and China, infected persons sometimes wear a surgical mask out of respect for others.



    Avian (Bird) Flu
    Avian influenza,

    sometimes Avian flu, and commonly Bird flu refers to "influenza caused by viruses adapted to birds."


    "Bird flu" is a phrase similar to "Swine flu", "Dog flu", "Horse flu", or "Human flu" in that it refers to an illness caused by any of many different strains of influenza viruses that have adapted to a specific host.

    All known viruses that cause influenza in birds belong to the species: Influenza A virus.

    All subtypes (but not all strains of all subtypes) of Influenza A virus are adapted to birds, which is why for many purposes avian flu virus is the Influenza A virus (note that the "A" does not stand for "avian").
    Adaptation is non-exclusive.

    Being adapted towards a particular species does not preclude adaptations, or partial adaptations, towards infecting different species.

    In this way strains of influenza viruses are adapted to multiple species, though may be preferential towards a particular host.

    For example, viruses responsible for influenza pandemics are adapted to both humans and birds.

    Recent influenza research into the genes of the Spanish Flu virus shows it to have genes adapted to both birds and humans; with more of its genes from birds than less deadly later pandemic strains.

    H5N1 Strain


    Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, also known as A(H5N1) or simply H5N1, is a subtype of the Influenza A virus which can cause illness in humans and many other animal species.

    A bird-adapted strain of H5N1, called HPAI A(H5N1) for "highly pathogenic avian influenza virus of type A of subtype H5N1", is the causative agent of H5N1 flu, commonly known as "avian influenza" or "bird flu".

    It is enzootic in many bird populations, especially in Southeast Asia. One strain of HPAI A(H5N1) is spreading globally after first appearing in Asia.

    It is epizootic (an epidemic in nonhumans) and panzootic (affecting animals of many species, especially over a wide area), killing tens of millions of birds and spurring the culling of hundreds of millions of others to stem its spread.

    Most references to "bird flu" and H5N1 in the popular media refer to this strain.



    As of the July 25, 2008 FAO Avian Influenza Disease Emergency Situation Update, H5N1 pathogenicity is continuing to gradually rise in wild birds in endemic areas but the avian influenza disease situation in farmed birds is being held in check by vaccination.

    Eleven outbreaks of H5N1 were reported worldwide in June 2008 in five countries (China, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam) compared to 65 outbreaks in June 2006 and 55 in June 2007.

    The "global HPAI situation can be said to have improved markedly in the first half of 2008 [but] cases of HPAI are still underestimated and underreported in many countries because of limitations in country disease surveillance systems".





    Pandemic Severity Index


    The Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) is a proposed classification scale for reporting the severity of influenza pandemics in the United States.

    The PSI was accompanied by a set of guidelines intended to help communicate appropriate actions for communities to follow in potential pandemic situations. [1]

    Released by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on February 1, 2007, the PSI was designed to resemble the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale





    From the Massachusetts Health and Human Services



    Isolation

    refers to separating people who are ill from other people to prevent the spread of a communicable disease.



    Quarantine

    refers to separating and restricting the movement of people who have been exposed to a communicable disease and are not yet ill.

  • Additional Information

    Creative Commons License
    Prepared Citizens by Catherine "Jackie" Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
    Based on a work at http://www.preparedcitizens.org.




    The posts on this site are subject to change. Mostly due to errors in spelling or grammar. I never said I am a professional journalist. I have new appreciation for the job that they do. Also, not all comments made by others will make it onto this site. Comments that advertise a commercial product do not get posted most of the time.


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« Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions – Part II
The Information Class »

Rehearsals, Drilling, Preparedness and HHS Secretary Leavitt

Posted by preparedcitizens on January 23, 2008

“To think is easy.
 To act is hard.
 But the hardest thing in the world
 is to act in accordance with your thinking.”

Goethe

If you play sports, act, or are a part of a team who is trained to respond, you understand the need to practice. We cannot know whether our thought out plans will actually work or where the “bugs” are that need to be worked out unless we set our plans into motion at some point BEFORE we need to rely upon them.

Many of us have been preparing our homes and communities for pandemic influenza but have yet to do a “dress rehearsal”. What will that last minute run to the store entail. How will you alert your family and friends that it is time to hunker down in order to ride out that first wave of a pandemic. What if this was “it” and a last chance to prepare. What if?

With the currents news of massive culling and outbreaks in Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam,  Pakistan, Indonesia and some information coming out of human illness, perhaps this is a great time to do a dress rehearsal or two or three.

Canada is bracing it’s citizen’s for a pandemic. And some school districts in the US are sending out pandemic preparedness information. Read the information from the Get Pandemic Ready website and make sure that you have all that you need on-hand.

 Also, since I did a dress rehearsal of a sort yesterday, I realized that the price of food and supplies has increased tremendously even since the last time I was in a store. I was absolutely shocked to see that a pound of grapes was $5.99! Economically speaking alone, it may be a good idea to stock up now.

 I have to admit that every time I buy a can of tuna fish I think of HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and his wise advice to stock up. He sure did take some ridicule for his comments then. I am sure that he would have gladly been wrong but his advice then is even more important to us to heed today. Kudos to Michael Leavitt for telling us to prepare.

“When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed. When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk, put it under the bed,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. “When you do that for a period of four to six months, you are going to have a couple of weeks of food. And that’s what we’re talking about.”

While similar pandemics have happened several times in the past, never before have we had all the advance warnings that the appearance and persistence of the H5N1 virus has made apparent. But never before have we possessed the wealth of knowledge on the problem and the ability to prepare and respond as we do now. The challenge is immense, but so is our will to protect and preserve.”

Michael Leavitt, Secretary US Department of Health and Human Services

Many have tried to inform as many people as they can from those leaders in the federal and state governments down to average citizens. We have been ready to educate any who asked questions or needed our assistance and have even spoken out to those who refuse to hear. Hopefully there will still yet be time for more preparations, but I will no longer hold off for those last minute preps. Time to be prepped all of the time, keep a vigilant eye on what develops from here on out, and be ready to shelter in place in a hurry.

Hopefully, what we are seeing is just a ramping up and not the beginnings of….but complacency is a dangerous thing right now….just my humble opinion and extra 3c.

This entry was posted on January 23, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under HHS, Health, Public Health, pandemic. Tagged: , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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« Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions – Part II
The Information Class »