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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Wasn't there a spike in normal influenza a few years ago that swamped the capacity of hospitals, private and public, in Los Angeles County?
That case is used now in textbooks. It's a real crisis. In San Diego, just after Katrina, they wanted to bring in 150 people from Louisiana with serious health conditions and offer them beds as a kind of gesture. Then they discovered those hospital beds didn't exist in San Diego County! In many ways, we're worse off than we were in 1918, when the country had a greater surge capacity and more hospital beds per capita than now.
It's absolutely incredible that the first-responder capabilities haven't been totally refurbished since September 11th.
Another dimension is that you need a community response, and what's most effective is giving people actual roles. As in the natural disaster planning in Japan, where there's an equivalent of the citizens alert. In San Francisco, the city identifies block by block anybody who has medical, engineering or law enforcement skills -- anything that would be useful in a disaster. This is because San Francisco has counted on being isolated by another earthquake for a matter of days with no outside aid. They've dealt with this by trying to create a grass-roots network, so everybody who has a skill is prepositioned and knows how to use it. That seems to make more sense than hoarding toilet paper and water and waiting to be dug out of the rubble, as we're told now.
"The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu"
By Mike Davis
New Press
192 pages
Nonfiction
The greatest danger, of course, in any pandemic is fear. Even if it wasn't that deadly we'd all be so scared that society would disintegrate. It's surprising how thin the veneer of civilization is.
That's what happens when you're left in a passive role -- when you're told you have no civic responsibilities; you know, it's each person for themselves, run to the hills, try and get some Tamiflu and hide it, keep it for your family. There's an atomization of society. That's what we have instead of the kind of civic solidarity that would exist if people had roles and if resources were available in communities on an equal basis.
Why, if this is all so obvious, and if you have so many medical professionals and good people trying to shout about this at the top of their lungs, why hasn't it improved? Why has this not translated into any kind of effective political protest or political action?
This brings us back to the absence in the country of a real opposition party. There's no political force capable of mounting serious battles on behalf of most of the basic issues for people in this country and abroad. John Kerry had every opportunity during the election to tack George Bush to the wall over the question of his failure to prepare for a pandemic influenza. It's an absolutely logical thing to do, particularly because the election was taking place in the middle of a flu crisis -- one of the two major vaccine suppliers collapsed in the fall of 2004.
When the Democrats do make noises, it seems the terms are framed by the Republicans.
That's why no one questions, for instance, the need to give away billions of dollars to the drug companies to get antivirals.
Let me try to end my endless riff with this. Roche is the pharmaceutical company with the patent, and therefore monopoly, on producing the antiviral medicine Tamiflu. It can save your life, and it's all made in a single plant in Switzerland. If you line up to buy it from Roche, like the Bush administration's doing, you stand in line for two or three years to get it. And then there won't be enough anyway. The administration is ordering 2 million courses. That's less than 1 percent of the population. This extremely limited supply sets up a "Sophie's choice" -- who will get this in an emergency?
Why are we waiting around? There's absolutely nothing to prevent the president of the United States from saying that the health of Americans overrides everything else, and we're going to start making Tamiflu and we'll have supplies in six months. It can be done, but it will never happen. And there's not, as far as I know, a single Democrat who is talking about this. Where is everybody? This is millions of people we're talking about. Wouldn't real leadership do something?
