The Information Class

Those on the net, with information at their fingertips have a tremendous advantage over those folks without access to a computer. Who is going to tell those not in the “information class” either by choice or economic status? I have to admit to some frustration in getting the word out. I really have tried many different ideas out. Handing out brochures in front of a Kmart, going door to door with brochures and tips, bulletin boards, churches, senior centers, health department. I even created a powerpoint presentation for local tv.

There is a need to prepare.

Hat tips to Monotreme and Siam

India influenza outbreak portends pandemic
Nathaniel Forbes
Wednesday, January 30 2008 11:49 AM
http://www.zdnetasia.com/

An epidemic of avian influenza in West Bengal, India has the Indian “government in panic mode”, according to the Times of India Web site. And with good reason: 15 million of West Bengal’s 80 million people are crammed into its capital city, Kolkata (Calcutta), which is a petri dish of poverty, pollution, political intransigence and hopeless public health. It is the city where Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity order.If the infection reaches Kolkata’s poultry markets, there is a much greater risk of animal-to-human transmission than there has been in Indonesia or Vietnam, where infections of H5N1 influenza have already crossed species from animals to humans. But Kolkata is a whole other miasma of misery. The population density of Kolkata is 24,000 people per square kilometer (62,000 per square mile), the second highest in the world. In comparison, the population density of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, is only 3,000 per square kilometer (8,000 per square mile), a fraction of Kolkata’s. Even the density of Jakarta, Indonesia, at 12,500 people per square kilometer (33,000 per square mile), is just half that of Kolkata.

For comparison, the density of New York City is 10,400 people per square kilometer (27,000 per square mile). Singapore, the fourth most densely-populated country in the world, has 6,300 people per square kilometer (16,000 per square mile).

India’s major population centers of Kolkata, Chennai (Madras), Mumbai (Bombay) and Delhi comprise four of the 13 most-populated and most densely-populated cities in the world. In addition to masses of destitute and therefore vulnerable people, they also host an enormous number of entrepreneurs, technologists and academics who are in demand globally and have the needs and means to travel to most of the developed world’s business centers.

With Bangalore and Hyderabad, those cities have also attracted in recent years large numbers of expatriate executives and managers, eager to work on the frontier of globalization, who travel to homes and home offices in Europe, Asia and North America regularly.

With the peripatetic friends and relatives of India’s enormous diaspora, the number of potential infection vectors is, practically, infinite.

When you are out and about preparing, please commit to telling one other person.

The more we speak about pandemic influenza, the more people will hear and prepare.