Pandemic Report Card: We're Dead
(Medical • Death)
This spring, when I thought my barber might’ve infected me with the virus, health officials still thought a lot of people could be killed in the first round of The Other White Meat Flu pandemic.
Now that I’m watching my youngest son recover from it and realize I may have had it several days ago in oblivion, it’s clear that this time around, at least, the virus is mostly merciful.
Good thing, too, because our public health safety net is full of holes, and funeral homes would have been piled high with bodies if the new flu virus packed a bigger wallop.
If most major media outlets hadn’t decided it’s no longer interesting enough to bother with, this might have been a FEMA/Hurricane Katrina moment for the ironically named Centers for Disease Control.
For starters, their Laboratory Response Network was a complete failure. Only one lab was designated to conduct pandemic flu tests in a region including much more than just Houston – and more than 6 million people. By April, more than 1,000 suspected pandemic flu patients were waiting…and waiting…and waiting for test results to find out what they had.
By the time the test results came back, they were meaningless. And if The Other White Meat Flu had been as virulent as last century’s Spanish Flu, about 1,000 people would’ve been dead before officially finding out why.
Thus, in its current form, the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network is essentially worthless.
I can’t bitch too much about CDC decisions on how to report the raw stats of the disease spread. At first those efforts, especially on the local level, were terrific. Our county health department and office of emergency management provided regularly updated reports showing how many residents had come down with the new flu, how many more suspected cases were out there and how many “probable” cases had been discovered. You also could find out without difficulty what schools and institutions were being closed as a result of new cases.
None of that is being done now, although the county emergency management people have a map on their web site that they say visually represents locations of known pandemic cases. (The map doesn’t work in any of my Linux browsers, and to me its not worth rebooting into Windows just to see if the map is broken for Microsoft users, too. But hey – cross-browser development should take on more of a sense of urgency when you’re talking about providing emergency information to the public, don’t you think?)
Less specific reporting notwithstanding, I can understand the change in policy. The CDC has declared that in Texas and much of the southern two-thirds of the country, The Other White Meat Flu is “widespread.” There are too many cases to keep up with on a chart, so they aren’t doing so any longer. Essentially, health officials have resigned themselves to the fact that we’re all going to get it. And they’re right.
But they’ve known that for quite a while.
So we come to the third section of our little pandemic report card – availability of a vaccine to combat the disease.
In this arena, the CDC and other involved federal agencies have failed again.
By the time any pandemic flu vaccine finds its way into Fort Bend County (if it ever does) most of us here will already have had it. The same goes for the two-thirds of the U.S. where the disease now is “widespread.” You can manufacture a King-Kong’s buttload of vaccine, but if you don’t distribute it until after most people have caught the disease, it might as well be so much iced tea.
The government relied on five companies to make 250 million doses of The Other White Meat vaccine. Those are the same five companies which manufacture vaccine for “regular” flu shots. They have orders for about 114 million doses of so-called “seasonal” flu vaccine.
But here’s a surprise: these companies weren’t able to handle a tripling of their normal production capacity. Not only have almost none of the pandemic flu vaccine doses been distributed, seasonal flu vaccine also has been delayed. From the AP:
The delay and cutbacks have already forced some doctor’s offices to turn away patients and others to cancel clinics around the country. In Lyon County, Kan., the health department canceled next week’s drive-thru flu shot clinic because it used up the doses it received in August and hasn’t received any more. The Jefferson City Medical Group in Missouri has depleted the partial shipment of vaccines it got for young children at its clinic.
Now here’s the kicker: In the neighborhood of 36,000 people die from seasonal flu in the United States alone. The way The Other White Meat Flu has panned out, people are a lot more at risk of dying from seasonal flu. And they may not be able to get a flu shot of any kind before it’s too late this year.
I don’t think the CDC has gotten much public pressure to act – probably because the major media has become bored with a flu that just isn’t sufficiently fatal. But unless the quasi governmental agency does an emergency makeover of its testing lab and vaccine manufacturing systems, the next flu outbreak could be just the death machine big media has been waiting for.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 02, 2009, 07 07 AM
Hi Judy, it’s good to hear from the Guatemalan contingent of our readership!
It’s curious to me how the swine flu seems to have spread throughout the southern U.S. so much more completely than the north. My understanding is that once the weather hits about 45 degrees, conditions are perfect for spread of flu viruses.
Yet the North has seen such weather already, and the South still is much warmer than that – but the South is the part getting hit.
I guess something’s always nipping at our heels – like a microscopic pack of wolves running down the caribou.
— Bob Oct 2, 10:54 AM #
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There you are, Joe Schmoe! I was looking for you when you left the inquiry on our site about the map not working in any Linux browsers, but you left fake contact info (assuming it was you). I tested it fairly extensively, and even had a few others do the same, and it worked in every test. If you let me know what flavor of Linux you’re running and which browser you prefer I can make sure it works for you (unless it’s Lynx).
Sorry it took me so long to get to this article, I’ve been a little behind on my RSS feeds lately.
— Lach Nov 10, 10:36 AM #
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For what it's worth, I usually use Ubuntu the latest, and got the above error using Firefox 3.0.15Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException: The message received from the server could not be parsed. Common causes for this error are when the response is modified by calls to Response.Write(), response filters, HttpModules, or server trace is enabled.
Details: Error parsing near ‘
<!DOCTYPE html P’.
— bob Nov 10, 11:05 AM #
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Thanks, Bob, I appreciate the detailed description a lot. I’ll look into it. I’m a non-practicing big-time Linux geek, and I’d never intentionally hurt a user, unless they were rockin’ a nice vintage copy of IE 6.
Meanwhile, the real Joe Schmoe remains an enigma. Maybe (s)he’ll chime in here…
— Lach Nov 10, 03:40 PM #
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