MySpace-style websites perfect for disaster survival.

Disaster officials are encouraging the use of social networking sites to communicate with citizens when a major disaster strikes.

MySpace-style websites perfect for disaster survival.

Dialling emergency services when a major disaster strikes is a typical first response. Now US computer scientists are recommending useful follow-up: logging on to a social networking site, such as MySpace, to share information and survival tips.
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"The current success stories from social networks are so provocative that it is worth giving it a try," says Shneiderman. "We have an opportunity to engage these emerging technologies for social benefit."

Fast Company

Lots of good stuff in this month's Fast Company.

Mastering Disaster. Gartner says that by 2007, 75% of large companies will have business recovery plans in place emphasizing resiliency and collaboration.

There's Gold in them thar Smelly Hills. A single ton of junked PCs has more gold that 17 tons of ore. Why landfills just might pay for their own cleanup.

Outsourcing Cool.

Very promising vaccine against avian flu

Let's hope that this moves fast.

Quick vaccine gets off the starting blocks Attached somehow to the cold virus, this new vaccine can be grown faster and the volume scaled up because it's grown in culture dishes and delivered via a nasal spray.

Researchers in the United States have unveiled a new, faster way to produce vaccines against a strain bird-flu virus. They claim that the technique can create a vaccine against a specific strain within 36 days.

Elderberry extract effective against avian flu

Now that Oprah has devoted an entire show to avian flu, the need for preparedness has finally hit home. You can hear the "untold story" here.
Her tips

• Stock your cabinets with enough canned goods to last four to five weeks.
• Stockpile your prescription drugs, if possible.
• Speak with city officials to make sure your community has enough chlorine on hand to purify the water, in case shipments stop coming. Many cities only keep enough chlorine on hand to last five to seven days.

Her guest was Dr. Michael Osterholm who said we can learn a lot from the lessons of Katrina. He said we need to be prepared to live without modern luxuries. He also said communities need to have a plan to bury their dead in a timely, respectful way. Nothing got people more upset during Katrina than the dead bodies that lay on the streets for days, sometimes weeks.

Your best all around resource is CIDRAP, the Center for infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota.

For me, the idea that elderberry extract may be effective against the bird flu is the best news I've heard all week. Elderberries were always an old folk remedy against flu and often called the "medicine chest" of the country people.

Now it turns out that an Israeli grandmother Dr. Madeline Mumcuoglu, a world-renowned virologist, has been working on an elderberry extract cure for the past 12 years. Wouldn't it be wonderful if this "comfortable and grandmotherly" woman has developed the cure for one of humanity's biggest threats?

Technorati Tags: avian flu, preparedness

Katrina corporate contributions

Compare the contributions - some very generous, others not, of American corporations to Katrina relief.

The one I liked the best was the only one given by an individual, Papa John's franchise owner  Keith Sullens in Houston.  He's using his location next door to the Astradome

to provide up to 10,000 Pizzas to people arriving at the Astrodome from the Superdome. He is also offering 150 delivery jobs open across the Houston area to people evacuated from New Orleans as a chance for them to get back on their feet. On the corporate Papa Johns will provide water to people evacuated to the Astrodome

It's personal, person to person.  A great American.

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina

A Second Depression?

Could an avian flu pandemic trigger a second Depression? 

The Bank of Montreal and its BMO Financial Group think so.

One of the biggest brokerage firms in Canada is sounding an alarm over the potential economic disaster that could result from an influenza pandemic. 
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In what's thought to be the first report of its kind, BMO Nesbitt Burns has issued a document, titled An Investor's Guide to Avian Flu.

The firm said its goal was twofold: to encourage the business community to get involved in planning and helping finance efforts to limit the effects of a possible pandemic; and to get Canadians to reconsider their buoyant optimism in the market.

""I think it's important to highlight the potential risk," said Sherri Cooper, the report's co-author and chief economist and executive vice-president of BMO Financial Group.

"I'm not trying to assess the probably of a pandemic. But it's out there, and it's frightening," she told CTV News.

Some of the repercussions projected in the report, were a pandemic were to break out, include:

• A dramatic slowdown in the economy, equal to the Great Depression. A rampant decline in spending would result from people panicking, which would put a sudden stop in spending.
• High levels of unemployment, with many people unable to work.
• Travel restrictions on the free-flow of goods and people across borders. "In a world that depends so heavily on global trade, this would have a very damaging effect on economic activity," said Cooper.
• A collapse in the housing market.
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The report adds if there were to be a serious pandemic that leads to high death rates, a surge in housing supply would be met with a reduction in demand. "And just like during the Depression, there would be a collapse in real estate values," said Cooper.

HT to Instapundit

Avian Flu update

Usually a glorious sight, the great migration of birds from western China to Siberia this brings a shuddering premonition of  fear and death.

At least 5000 wild birds and geese died in western China from infections with the H5N1 virus. 

H5N1 is the variant of avian flu that is the most worrisome because it's fatal to humans, and has killed to date some 57 people in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.  Last week,  two more people died in Vietnam.  Both had eaten sick chicken before falling ill.

Because chicken and duck farms can be quarantined and infected birds destroyed, public health scientists and government officials hold tight to slim hopes that the outbreaks of avian flu can be localized and a global pandemic averted.

But the virus jumps from domesticated birds to wild birds and geese,  hopes begin to die.  When infected birds migrant from Qinchan Lake in western China to central  Siberia, they bring the highly contagious virus with them.  About two weeks ago, large numbers of ducks, turkeys, chicken and geese began dying in the Novosibirsk region in Russia.    They were all incinerated to keep the virus from spreading. 

The great fear is that H5N1 will spread to the country's main poultry farms in the heavily populated European part of Russia.

UK and US teams,  using computer models to work out various scenarios if the H5N1 virus mutates to allow human-to-human transmission,  say a global pandemic could claim 20 to 40 million lives,   They also say, surveillance and a targeted use of anti-viral drugs requiring close cooperation of governments and decisive action within days could still stop a global pandemic. 

We can hope and pray this works, but nothing can beat being prepared.

UPDATE: Quarantine imposed on all poultry farms in Russia via Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Wiki for A Killer Flu

I am happy to report that the wiki I suggested the writers of Effect Measure put up in my post On Borrowed Time has been up now for about a week under the instigation of bloggers at Effect Measure, The Next Hurrah and Just a Bump in the Beltway. 

The Flu Wiki is a wonderful experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health and self-reliance.

A Wiki is a form of collaborative software that allows anyone to edit (change) any page on the site using a standard web browser like Explorer, Firefox or Safari.The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Communications technology has now become sufficiently available to allow a new form of collaborative problem-solving that harvests the rich fund of knowledge and experience that exists among those connected via the internet, allowing more talent to participate.

Already there have been 23,000 page views with contributions from scientists, epidemiologists, sociologists et al according to the DemFromCT, the contributor from the Next Hurrah.

Declan Butler emailed me from Paris as soon as it went up.  He's the senior reporter for Nature magazine and the author of the fictional blog that first alerted me to the danger.  It's still the best piece for imagining what it will be like when a pandemic breaks out.

If you can contribute do so.  Otherwise, just read so you know what's happening and what's not.    Here's some other links to get you up to speed.

From Trust for America’s Health, June 2005,  A Killer Flu, which projects over half a million Americans could die and 2.3 million could be hospitalized if a moderately severe strain of a pandemic flu virus hits the United States.

In Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2005, The Next Pandemic, by Laurie Garrett.  If the H5N1 virus becomes "capable of human-to-human transmission and retains its extraordinary potency, humanity could face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."

Avian Flu blog - What we need to know

On Borrowed Time

It was a fictional weblog that got me interested in avian flu.

Its imaginative putting me in the place where a pandemic is happening, telling me a story in other words, made me begin to grasp the seriousness and the likelihood of a global flu pandemic in the next few years.

Like most other people, I'm the victim of my own experience. Never having suffered a public pandemic, it's hard to imagine one. Never having experienced public panic or a breakdown of essential services, it's hard to imagine them. Somehow, I expect that all the wonders of our modern age from medicines to the Internet to an abundant supply of food, will continue without interruption forever into the future. I fancy myself a student of history, so you would think I'd know better.

Didn't the 9/11 Commission point to a "failure of imagination" as a principal reason that kept US officials from understanding the al Qaeda threat?

I think we are at a similar point now.

Have you heard anyone in the Centers for Disease Control talk about this? Maybe they are ashamed about their obesity fiasco. You remember that or do you? In 1999, the CDC director said obesity was epidemic in the United States, accounting for more than 300,000 deaths a year. Last year in a widely publicized study , the CDC upped obesity-related deaths to 400,000 until the figures were exploded as the whoppers they were. A embarrassing comedown for the CDC who had to admit only 25, 815 obesity deaths. Nevermind

It took a magazine, not a government agency, to alert me. And they did it with a story and a weblog.

Nature magazine is devoting its current issue to highlight progress and "incoherence in the world's response to a potential human pandemic."

From its editorial

Millions of people killed in highly developed countries within months. Tens of millions worldwide. The global economy in tatters. A Hollywood fantasy? No — it's now a plausible scenario. The first act, the spread of avian flu to, and probably between, humans, has already started across Asia. Unless the international community now moves decisively to mitigate this pandemic threat, we will in all probability pay heavily within a few years. Then, hard questions will be asked as to why we were not prepared.

Sceptics abound, convinced that talk of a pandemic must be scare-mongering, or scientists crying wolf. Surely with support care, drugs and vaccines, at least the rich world can easily stand up to a flu virus? After all, this is 2005, not 1918, when a flu pandemic killed up to 50 million people worldwide. But while the science and medicine of flu have advanced substantially, our ability to mount an effective public-health response has made remarkably little progress over the decades, and the potential for panic is, if anything, greater given the impact of television and the Internet.
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The time for diplomacy and denial is over. It is time for advocacy and action.

The avian viruses in Asia are evolving: they've jumped the species barrier to infect pigs in Indonesia and human-to-human transmission may well have occurred. According to World Health Organization earlier this month, the H5N1 viruses "are continuing to evolve and present a continuing and potentially growing pandemic threat."

I'm in no way qualified to assess this threat, so I went to Effect Measure whose editors are senior public health scientists and practitioners who write anonymously and link to all the blogs writing on avian flu. They call the conclusion of the WHO report "chilling"

Evolution of a pandemic strain of virus may be preceded by numerous small steps, none of which is sufficient to signal clearly that a pandemic is about to start. This poses a difficult public health dilemma. If public health authorities move too soon, then unnecessary and costly actions may be taken. However, if action is delayed until there is unmistakable evidence that the virus has become sufficiently transmissible among people to allow a pandemic to develop, then it most likely will be too late to implement effective . . . responses."

WHO is openly admitting that everyone is unprepared.

"We are working on pandemic preparedness on borrowed time," the WHO's top influenza official, Klaus Stohr, told the meeting, reiterating that conservative estimates indicated that up to 7.4 million people might die.

"The objective of pandemic preparedness can only be damage control. There will be death and destruction."

"National pandemic response plans are the key," he said.

If millions of lives could be lost, if state and local governments don't know what to do, why in God's name has the CDC been more concerned about obesity and even getting that wrong. Not until this week did the CDC Director Julie Gerberding say

Even a "medium level pandemic" in the United States could result in 89,000-207,000 deaths and up to 734,000 people people being hospitalised...... According to Gerberding, between 15 percent and 35 percent of the US population would be affected by a flu pandemic and the cost to the US economy would be between 71 billion and 166 billion dollars.

The US has only a draft pandemic response plan, and has ordered only 2.3 million doses of Tamiflu, the only antiviral medication that seems to work.

It's Decisive Inaction.

The US pandemic influenza plan, in the works for five years and in only in draft form since last August will be completed in final form "by the end of the summer."
Marcia Cross, the [the Government Accountability Office's] director for health care, told lawmakers that federal officials have yet to determine what role the federal government will take in purchasing supplies of vaccine against bird flu and other flu strains. The government has also not cemented which population groups would be priorities for emergency vaccination in the event of an outbreak or finalized plans for possible quarantines or travel restrictions.

The delay has left state health departments unable to properly plan for flu emergencies, she says. (Via WebMD).

If there is a pandemic, it will be everywhere.
The scene of the disaster will be everywhere.
Everywhere is local. All the battles will be fought on the local level.

So, if the government is not prepared, what can ordinary people and businesses do to prepare? What will happen when 25% of the workforce gets sick

Effect Measure has begun a Pandemic "To-Do" list which I hope they make it a public wiki.

1. Rationing. Who gets what first? Who gets what at all? Who secures scarce supplies?

2. Care-giving. There are simply not enough hospital beds. There are not enough nurses. There are not enough caskets.
Time NOW to offer minimal nursing training for volunteers and a way to keep track of them. One commenter said many died needlessly in 1918-1920 from lack of hydration and nourishment.

3. Emergency equipment
and I'll add

4. Emergency plans to carry on essential services like water, electricity, fuel, banking and food supply. It's time for businesses to review their emergency contingency plans as well as their business continuity plans NOW. Time NOW to establish policies for people working at home and the means for them to do so. Time NOW to introduce Wikis to capture the knowledge necessary to keep businesses going. Time NOW to prepare crisis management blogs. Time NOW for people to assess their own personal and family preparedness.

If you need more to break out of your complacency, read Canada Sue's imaginings of what would happen in her hometown of 100,000.